Summer 2024 Federation Check-in

Hello users of Hexbear with the upcoming version of lemmy 0.19.4 we will be able to change local communities' federation to local only however it is experimental as they are developing private communities.

In a previous federation discussion, we stated that we would temporarily remove lemm.ee from our allow-list until hexbear communities and users have the means by which to set hexbear communities to not federate out, restricting it to hexbear users. Now that this tool is available, we will refederate with lemm.ee after we complete the update.

Please use this post to discuss federation in general, as well as provide feedback to the hexbear mod and admin team in regard to federation.

68 comments

Addendum:
Anyone interested in helping these communities become more active? They are at risk of being removed if they remain inactive
List of inactive communities (2month)
https://hexbear.net/c/maps
https://hexbear.net/c/polyamory
https://hexbear.net/c/den
https://hexbear.net/c/agriculture
https://hexbear.net/c/paganism
https://hexbear.net/c/oceania
https://hexbear.net/c/maritime
https://hexbear.net/c/taylorswift
https://hexbear.net/c/mycology
https://hexbear.net/c/librehab
https://hexbear.net/c/bestofhexbear
- Consider this my kick in the butt to get the polyam community more active I didn't realize it had been so long since anyone posted there. Oops. Life has been ridiculous lately.
  Also if anyone does want to please mod them I clearly could use the help and I really do want it to be a real community eventually
- Yeah best of Hexbear never really got off the ground mb
  
  no worries if you or no one else wants to step in you are welcome to lock it (set it to only moderators can post) and we consider it shuttered until someone wants to take it back up
- For a moment I thought /c/librehab was "libre hab". I was thinking it was about using free-software/free-hardware projects for home automation like Home Assistant.
  
  I've been here for almost a year and seen the name many times. Never even crossed my mind that it would be anything but home automation.
- What happens to the posts and comments in those comms if the comms get removed?
  
  If the moderator wants to lock them they can be shuttered as is otherwise they can be removed. Removed communities can be restored at any time they are just not visible/interactable to users. In short the posts and comments cannot be seen/interacted with unless restored at a later time, where as a locked/shuttered community would have visible/interactable posts/comments but nothing new can be made
- please don't remove c/maps, I'll try to post harder

im pro refederating with lemm.ee and though i know it's probably a pipe dream im also in favour of seeing whether something could be worked out to do like a partial refederation with blahaj zone
- No to blahaj. Let the people of NATO be free from the Hexbearian oppression
  
  Honestly would prefer a trans only poll on it
- Yeah I think if we refed blahaj this would be the time. Gotta be merciless with the bans.
  
  The admin over there is bad, and if federation has taught me anything it's that federation with an instance with bad admin is a nonstarter
  
  This this this. We can make a lot of ground with new comrades through a few of these instances if we continue to be clear about and uphold our community standards. If that means more mods on more communities for a while to keep things clear and uphold TC69 thought so be it. But I think we have a lot to gain by putting in the work as a community here.
- lemm.ee can probably work, their admin tries to be reasonable even if he's a lib with serious brainworms. blahaj probably cant work, their admin is a serious shitlib who doesn't attempt to be reasonable
- I'd prefer to stay as far away from blahaj as possible. I'd prefer to not have chasers in our space.

I think it's really fun to federate with places and deride the libs, but I'm not the vulnerable population. I love our reputation as the shitheads on the block.
- Dirtbag left reporting for PPBing

As always I'm quite happy for us to federate with other instances freely. We've always done a great job of keeping out the problem-causing users.
More Lemmy tools to regulate that is neat and hopefully means people can feel more confident in Hexbear remaining a safe space while we do so.

For anyone's information, main, news, politics, and marxism are not going to switch to local only barring any extenuating circumstances.

I don't think this will end well. .ee has always been an instance with a massive reactionary problem and it hasn't gotten any better. They just recently started hosting a community that was banned from another instance for outright eco-fascism. I get when people have a desire to dunk on nazis, but there's better ways to do that than to invite the fascists into your living room.
- I think it could work out ok. Certain communities intended as safe/exclusive spaces (e.g. !traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns@hexbear.net or !em_poc@hexbear.net) can block .ee, while other communities like !the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net, !history@hexbear.net, or !news@hexbear.net may opt to allow more reactionary visitors for discussion.
  I suppose it does remove the option to browse outside of 'subscribed' for those who want to stay in the safe spaces. The alternative is requiring Hexbear as a site to default to the most exclusive set of instances, which may be more strict than some Hexbears want or need.
  
  Yeah, i get the idea behind this and it's kinda interesting as an experiment. I absolutely appreciate the functionality behind it and i also get that my extremely negative views on federation don't have a majority on this site. Like, if it was up to me, we wouldn't even be federated with .ml or grad, and that's obviously not something most users here would go along with. So keeping some comms internal and others public-facing seems like a viable compromise in general.
  I'm just saying i have a bad feeling about how it will turn out in this specific case. .ee always had a way too large share of problematic users and that can't get any better after they've just lifeboated a bunch of literal death cultists.
  
  I may not be for blocking ee on traa, will need to dig through the modlog and see how important that is Edit: Yeah it appears we had no removals from ee, seems fine
  Most off-site removals were from sjw and discuss.de

I will continue to browse on local and feel contempt for the @s that i see
- That doesn't seem to be enough to stop the lemmygrad users posting Facebook-tier memes

On that note what are the rules for dealing with libs and other fascists? Like how far can we go? I caught a ban from reddit years ago for telling fascists to suck lead too many times so I haven't been doing that here, but when fascists come into our space and tell me I should support genocide it's kind of the most appropriate response, IMO.
I don't want to get banned because I "overreacted" to the fascists if we let them back in. And .ee absolutely has them
- Excellent, thank you. This is better IMO than the self-harm redditism anyway, as they do not deserve agency in their own punishment for being fascist monsters.
- Not a mod, but I think anything but suicide baiting is allowed.
  
  Correct, encouraging self harm is not okay but other than that we take a gloves off approach.

I think this is a great feature, the more comms I can consolidate under this account the better. Being able to protect specific sub's from brigades while leaving others open is ultimately good for the network as a whole. Private comms are going to be a great edition too. Hopefully this allows more instances to be federated even if it's partial.

I think re federating lemmee would be fine, but only them for now. When private comm get more updates like the ability to choose which instance to block, then i would be open to federation with more big instances.
- What about us? I love my hexbear comrades...
  
  You are fine, im mostly refering to refederation with shitworks and blahaj

doesn't hexbear already have private commmunities? they are mentioned here and there. i can't access any of them which i always assumed was due to not being invited or something.
- there was a previous feature (pre-federation) that hid the community from the all feed if a user wasn't subscribed to it which was referred to as a private community but is actually a hidden community. The feature being added in 19.4 prevents the community from federating out or being seen without a local user account

as a trans person, im anti blahaj
i don't want to be subjected to liberal brainworms taking over my siblings and niblings

- chickens are so cute
  
  hexbear can have little a pet chickens as a treat

- I think we've done an excellent job with federation. I used to be against it due to fears of losing site culture and being infiltrated by libs, but now I see we can handle it.

I say we make every comm private except The Dunk Tank and use it as bait
They'll come in and see us making fun of what they think are totally normal takes and walk right into it