Remote View

1y ago

We should defederate from Lemmygrad.

Might be a bad idea for me to go into this while having ptsd issues, especially when I'm probably about to do a long ass sleep, but yolo.

Basic synopsis on my feelings here:

tl;dr: I used to believe we should be federated, but after 3ish years of interacting with lemmygrad on various accounts, I have noticed that lemmygrad is not a place that is safe for transgender people at large. The reason for this is principally their debatelord culture and refusing to comprehend that debating a point against a minority's lived experience, then demanding civility when that minority gets angry, is the same shit liberals do.
I noticed instances of reactionary content, such as here and/or comments are not removed or users banned. Lemmygrad seems to prefer to debate reactionaries, and obviously subjecting minority groups to reactionary content for personal fun is callous at best, and reactionary at worst. Its important to make it so that there are designated areas for dunking on reactionary content, as well as nsfw and content tags to avoid it. Otherwise, reactionary comments should be removed and visible in a mod log.
I discussed in this post why it is important to remove downvotes to protect trans people. After I noticed people were creating evasive comments to debate me, I pretty much told them to fuck off. This resulted in a ban from their admins and they continued to defend their policy. This reminds me a lot of the struggle sessions we used to have about adding pronouns to the site or removing downvotes. People would be evasive in this same way to give the benefit of the doubt then demand civility when people get angry. Those people are not allies and should be purged.
The admins seem to have a principle misunderstanding of why minorities don't want to see any form of harassment or discrimination directed at them and how that is perpetuated across social media sites. They seem to legitimately believe that keeping downvotes means that they will be able to stave off reactionary content or is somehow a valuable tool in responding to reactionary content, when in reality they should be removing and banning reactionary content.
Certain users were very keen on civility bullshit, particularly @simply_surprise@lemmygrad.ml, @muad_dibber@lemmygrad.ml (an admin), @davel@lemmygrad.ml. This is honestly the most disgusting behavior I've seen on lemmygrad, and the fact that the admins doubled down on it is fucked.

I can see staying federated to a bunch of very small instances, especially queer focused and hobby instances, but I'm pretty soured on the fediverse at this point.

I'm extremely disappointed in what I've seen of the lemmygrad mod team. Why are they making me into a splitter over such a basic issue of avoiding the harassment of trans people at a systemic level, bastards

I am willing to retract this if the admins of lemmygrad self crit and apologize for temp bans or otherwise of my accounts on civility reasons and make it clear that debating the lived experience of anyone of a minority group is unacceptable going forward. There are positive and proactive ways of discussing someone's lived experience without going into debate territory and trying to find a technicality in lived experiences to support an opinion you already hold. I maintain that removing downvotes is a boon to trans users, if you can come up with something better than that and implement it, I am all ears.

101 comments

No for defederation. You proceed to go on another instance (in a community that was for lemmygrad users only according to the sidebar), told them how they should do things, got banned, and now come to complain here. As other lemmygrad users rightfully pointed out, their site does not have the same history or culture as ours with regards to downvotes. As they also rightfully said, how would you react if lemmygrad users came here and told us to reinstate downvotes? It's fine to have a difference of opinion on matters as trivial as downvotes existing, it's a different instance. It's not hexbear 2.0. It will have different policies. They agree with us on 99% of things anyway, I'm pretty sure disagreeing about downvotes should not be a reason for defederation.
lemmygrad_court
This is a community for Lemmygrad users and admins to discuss administrative issues in a more transparent manner
- This is bullshit. I could go into the specifics but the idea that a trans person can't go onto another instance to recommend trans positive changes to a website, when it affects THEIR community, is absurd. Like seriously, fuck off. Let alone the fact that I have interacted with lemmygrad for years now.
  
  Yeah I don't get the argument that bad interactions on another instance aren't supportive of a reason to federate. That's the way defederation starts lol.
  Though I do think Lemmygrad are comrades they just need to develop at their own pace.
  Edit: transphobes of all types should be relentlessly bullied though. And you should be unbanned from Lemmygrad. I'm just remembering that hexbear required several struggle sessions to become trans positive and think Lemmygrad is actually in a better place than where we started, outside of that one mod.
- The whole idea of not allowing people from other instances (which doesn't even apply here since she is using her Lemmygrad account and is participating a Lemmygrad discussion as a 2 year member of Lemmygrad) goes against the spirit of federation. OP started a thread on Lemmygrad referencing a policy set by Hexbear, so why shouldn't a proponent from Hexbear who pushed hard for said policy appear in that Lemmygrad thread, using her 2 year old Lemmygrad account no less? This is not that much different from the losers at shitjustworks crying about Hexbear and complaining about Hexbear brigadarinos^TM when people here give them a piece of our minds.
  
  we have the den comm for hexbear users only. the community absolutely isn't the same post-federation and it makes sense to have a spot for community members to discuss the site and their lives without anyone from a federated comm butting in
- ?

A few things about this.
On the one hand:
I agree with you on removing downvotes being a good change, especially for minorities, and I think the argument that "downvotes help hide transphobic rhetoric" is a "free marketplace of ideas"-adjacent argument that ironically relies on the majority to support the minority.
I agree that the admin telling you "Actually, removing downvotes does not make it a better experience for trans people" does fall into "debatebroing a trans person's lived experience" territory and is definitely worth criticizing.
On the other hand I read through the thread and think I need to point out some things:
You opened up with "we should do what hexbear does" and when someone disagreed, you immediately went to "So you think hexbear is platforming reactionary content?", which is needlessly hostile and turns the whole thing into a lemmygrad vs hexbear debate when it really shouldn't be.
I disagree with calling this "civility fetishism". Civility fetishism is when people tell you to be calm while you're talking about hospitals being bombed in Gaza or when they tell you to be polite towards nazis, I don't think it's inappropriate to remain civil when talking about whether you should be able to downvote posts on lemmygrad dot ml. Civility is not inherently a bad thing, we only mock it when people tell us to be civil while arguing with people who actively want us dead.
I think some people in that thread are right that you are too quick to assume bad faith from a group of people who, and I can't stress this enough, aren't your enemies. Lemmygrad and hexbear agree on 99% of issues and personally, I have seen very few shitty takes from them. I think this admin was being kind of a douche and a debatebro, but they're still an admin on an explicitly marxist-leninist site that is overwhelmingly more good than bad.
I think you had an incredibly uncomfortable and frustrating experience because you got dogpiled on and downvoted on lemmygrad and consequently talked yourself into a rage, which I can sympathize with, it's a terrible experience, I've been there. As you yourself said, you're probably not in the best mental state to argue about this right now. I would urge you to cool your head and try to review the discussion in good faith. Assume that other MLs aren't your enemies and they might just be wrong on this issue for normal reasons, not because they're actually a reactionary who wants to suppress minorities. Remember that a lot of people on hexbear also opposed the removal of downvotes before it happened.
- Lemmygrad and hexbear agree on 99% of issues
  This is the bottom line for me. If we can't get along with people we're aligned with this closely, we'll never get anything done.

I read the points, seems clear that Lemmygrad does have less focus on being a purely safe space as Hexbear. But their users, when here, seem to always be on the level in my experience.
So I understand disliking the place, but I don't understanding how defederating helps address those concerns.
- Agree just ban the stupid ones, theres some lemmygrad posters that have been cool and nice
  
  Unfortunately, one of the stupid ones is an admin and is presumably backed up by other admins. If there were just two stupid non admins I would be ignoring this and reporting the trolls.
- Maybe a statement of condemnation from our mods would bring attention to the issue for some of their users. Defederating is the nuclear option and surely there are other steps we can take first?
  
  I would agree, this is mostly a call for more dialogue about this. I think its a serious issue.
- The issue is the admins. Afaik if they ban people, you can't see them here from the side of lemmygrad. This means they can over time ban any trans people that they think are too aggressive by their absurd civility rule (re: people can just troll trans people and when the trans people get angry, you ban the trans people) and have likely cut off a critical source of info for trans users in their instance. I'm of the opinion of forcing people to choose the option that is not shit by defederating, if they choose to not fix this dogshit rule. You also don't know if you're on their shitlist because from what I can tell their modlog is not public.

I personally don't agree, if only for the fact that grad has turned out to be the only actually left-wing instance besides our own.
Also, as others have mentioned, the people from the grad who have started hanging out with us here are cool, the ones who may not like our site culture don't come over here to start shit. If that starts happening at some point I'm absolutely open to changing my mind of course.
Sort by local and all you'll see from the grad are the friendly folk.
- The issue is I don't like the fact that if a post shows up on our all feed, and they ban one of our trans users from their users being a debatelord, then their 29% of their website that is trans no longer will see trans positive content that user produces. This creates a potential spiral over time that hurts the trans community overall between all communities. And this is something I'm concerned with with lemmy.ml and even blahaj too and I'm constantly thinking of a way to fix it up better, I really feel like the federation concept has only served to split the queer community and theres got to be some way to fix it.
  Hope I explained well.
  
  You've made your points perfectly well and I don't necessarily disagree with any of them except the call for defederation.

While I think your criticisms were basically correct and the ban was bullshit, I don't think this rises to the level of defederation for me. The systems and culture we've developed here are a unique combination of circumstance and deliberate policy. I myself argued against downvote removal all those years ago. A lot of people did. If it had just been put to a popular vote, I doubt it would have ever passed.
Looking back now, history has fully vindicated the mods. Getting rid of downvotes not only had the intended effect of helping to create a safe space for marginalized comrades, but has had so many beneficial, consequential secondary order effects that it's difficult, ironically, to imagine the site with downvotes at all.
So while I think your arguments to the 'Gradders were correct, I can't really blame them for not being able to take your criticisms on board because we ourselves found a path forward by fumbling forward together. They are Lemmygrad, not Hexbear, and they deserve our pity for that

If we're gonna defed from Lemmygrad, just turn the whole damn thing off and throw the federation experiment in the trash.
- Its kinda how I feel. I do wanna collect some of the small innocent queer instances and stuff though. If there is ever a way to get certain communities piecemeal I'd jump at it so we could poach all the trans stuff from everywhere else and let their subscribers post here.
- Yes. Yes. Yes. Make this a normal website again and not some hyper-Reddit freakshow.

Sino Soviet Split at home

I feel like this isn't enough to warrant a defederation? Like, yeah I get that debating reactionaries and the like isn't something a decent chunk of people want to do, but that would be confined to Lemmygrad spaces. It's still not an issue in Hexbear proper. And there's been lots of great people interacting here from Lemmygrad. I don't think we should defederate.

I think most of what you say is at minimum valid points of concern and critique for lemmygrad, but none of it rises to the level of defederation making sense.
If you want to change a community, especially one that you only have limited involvement in, it's very important to be patient and to understand where the people more involved in the community are coming from (no investigation etc).
If you aren't up to that because it involves suffering through a certain level of bullshit (and it does), that's totally fine, but it's more a reason for you to stay off of grad than for us to defederate.
Dune fox boy has an attitude problem and I think that's concerning, but even as we seek for him to fix it, we need to understand that he has been one of the main admins of grad for a long time and been dealing with liberal bullshit from federated communities for a long time and his excessive defensiveness (and it is excessive) does not merely come from a fundamental evil in his soul nor does it mean we should flatly condemn him instead of work with him to improve.
We are all humans here, and I think that the people on lemmygrad (even Dune boy) have demonstrated that they want for things to be better than they are, so it is worth suffering their weak points just as they suffer ours so we can both try to help each other improve. Not everyone in each group will necessarily be up to that, but they can just stay in their own circles because each group respecting the other's rules is a reasonable baseline expectation that is already enforced.
Edit: banning you was incorrect and Dune boy should apologize for that one, imo. Banning someone to get them to disengage when the interactions are negative is valid, but that doesn't seem to be the given reason nor would it have been timed very well if it was. You were treated with a lack of respect and benefit of the doubt that you should have been given as a relative pillar of a sister community and that's not okay.

I went and read the thread that no doubt spawned this one and a few things.
First everything you said on grad is correct.
Second they can't come here and do that shit because they will be banned, admin or not.
Third I'm not sure I understand how defederation solves anything. Historically we have defederated because their users were coming into Hexbear and harassing our users or posting shit content to a degree that the our modmins couldn't or shouldn't deal with. Is that happening with grad? If it is, okay then yeah probably defed. I haven't seen it (on Hexbear at least... again you're spot on that the kind of debatelord "respect bad views" shit is happening on grad.) Maybe it is happening here too and our mods are just so powerful that none of us ever see the bad shit. But if they aren't coming here and stirring up shit...then just don't go to their comms? You can just go local only and that solves the immediate harm they're doing to you and other trans comrades in the site. Defederation doesn't remove them from the Internet they'll still be over there with their shit takes. You just won't see them unless you choose to go and engage them... which is exactly the same as just browsing local only or not subscribing to any grad comms.
If the root issue here is "Hexbear should not be federated with any instance that does not have a 1:1 ideological alignment with Hexbear" then that's a different discussion and one that's probably interesting to have but one that would necessarily result in Hexbear just completely defederating from everyone because there is no community on the fediverse that does a better job protecting minority comrades than Hexbear. Maybe that's a discussion worth having again.
- I get your point. I'm probably not in the best state of mind to argue or suggest, but other than what I have already said, I would like to posit the idea that by staying federated (assuming the admins do not respond or resolve the issue) we are associating ourselves with communists that support banning trans people for "incivility". We are selectively federated to many things, why would we selectively choose to associate with people that make our own ideas look bad?
  Thanks for your input though
  
  we are associating ourselves with communists that support banning trans people for "incivility"
  This part I do also agree with you that their mods should take a better stance on. Being transphobic is uncivil no matter how nice the window dressing they put on it is, so it would be nice to see their "be civil" rules applied equally here. And that might even be enough to address much of your issue too; if the transphobes get banned for their "civil" transphobia then job done. They say they're doing this but in your experience they aren't, and I'm more willing to believe your experience on that than what they're saying.
  So hopefully their admin team sees all this and agrees that they need to do better.

I hope the sleep helps, comrade.
I don't think the issues you present here are worth defederation with an otherwise staunchly communist and anti-transphobic instance. I don't agree with their policy on comment voting and I would like them to commit to being proactive about removing transphobia, but allowing a dimbulb reactionary to babble on about stuff they don't understand isn't that serious, and in that first example you linked, I think you should practice recognizing when an online interaction is more emotionally draining than edifying, and disengaging when that's the case.
- I simply don't think they're staunch anything if this is their reaction to what was originally a friendly suggestion.
  also i havent slept
  
  Maybe you're right and I just haven't interacted with them enough. I'll keep a closer eye, personally.

One thing I see repeatedly in that removing downvotes thread is justifying bad decisions as accommodations for burned out users. It's very silly, and somewhere between liberalism and skill issue.
- i will never stop posting
- Hot-Take coming!
  ::: spoiler spoiler "if you are so burnt-out you can't just type 'terrible take' or 'bad take' or 'g t f o' and you NEED the one-click-solution,,, it may be time to touch grass, come back and laugh at all the great dunks others (more capable posters) made". As I was typing this I realize again how great it is we don't have downer-arrows.

I can't speak from the trans experience, so it's possible problems were there that were invisible to me, but I thought that Lemmygrad (or communism.lemmy.ml initially) had a fantastic community three or four years ago and I actually preferred it to chapo.chat. The effortposts and friendly community did a lot to bring me further left. The site became horribly toxic overnight the second genzedong got banned from reddit. I ended up giving up on it about a month afterwards and haven't logged in since.
- I did generally like it, particularly the trans community on there, but its incredibly disappointing how its evolved over time for sure. Maybe I was just more blind to these issues before, or maybe I'm actually asking people to be more inclusive of trans people and that makes them angry, rather than just talking about trans stuff. I don't know.

If the things you described were being imposed on us by federating with lemmygrad, then I would agree. But as it stands it’s limited to their instance right? To me, federating with an instance is like having a visa-free/open border. We can travel between our instances easily but we have to follow the rules of the instance we are currently in. So federating with them doesn’t change hexbear, and my experience so far is that it works pretty well. And your bad experiences over there seem limited to when you go over there. I’m sorry for the trouble they’ve caused you though, that sounds disheartening.

Them, a bunch of soyjaks: Nooooooo, we need to keep downvotes, how do we show displeasure at lib posts noooooo
Me, a gigachad: We should get rid of upvotes as well and retvrn to phpBB forums.
But seriously, that admin is full of shit and always had sus vibes to me. Upvotes and downvotes only came about in Web 2.0 social media sites and even then, it's mostly a Reddit thing. Old-school forums didn't have any of that bullshit. It's very obvious that upvotes/downvotes are used to drive up engagement (people get mad that the wrong thing got upvoted/downvoted) as well as provide a quantifiable metric that the algo, which purposely feeds people angry slop that further drives engagement, can use. So their nonsense of "getting rid of downvotes is lib" is just that, nonsense. The real lib move is to keep the upvote/downvote paradigm that was set up by a shitty social media corporation. Mao's Combat Liberalism, if they are so inclined to consider a shitty Reddit clone as a form of combating liberalism, stipulates that we're supposed to actually explain shit to people, not press a shitty downvote button.
Their grips about the evil Hexbearian somehow imposing their site culture on their instance is also nonsense. First of all, they (and the vast majority of Lemmy instances) don't have a unique site culture. They're just Reddit clones with the same shitty Reddit-derived semblance of site culture. Oh no, their genzedong-derived culture will have to change. How will they possibly cope. Second of all, a prominent Hexbear user advocating for good changes to make their instance less shitty isn't imposition. Have Hexbear admins threaten the Lemmygrad admins to defederate Hexbear from Lemmygrad? Did Hexbears do a brigardino^TM and mass upvoted your comments? No, we have not. The OP of that thread is a Lemmygrad user, as demonstrated by the numerous posts on Hexbear using a Lemmygrad account, so they can't accuse us of creating alts and trying to change their instance from within. And finally, getting rid of downvotes isn't even exclusively a Hexbear thing since the chasers over at blahaj had done so as well.
- Tribalism over instances is so fucking dumb. I just want all queer people to join hands and sing kumbaya as we nuke Britain into the sea. Is that too much to ask?
  
  i'm sorry comrade, but i don't know the words..
- they're better and don't have all this dumb voting bullshit
  
  Reddit was a huge step backwards with what we had before, and not only was it a huge step backwards, it also killed scores of forums along with it.

Not disputing any points but the vast majority of users on lemmygrad in my experience are true comrades and are very useful in the other instances as backup, they make it harder to accuse hexbears of being a weird abberant view because you see organic agreement from other instances in a heated discussion. It would be a shame to lose all of them because of some debatelords. In my opinion.

- It is pretty ml-pilled, but its still important to be non-sectarian
  from the mao man
  To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is the sixth type of liberalism.

- The critical issue is that the admins have not self crit.
  I will always be hostile to liberals that are going to debate me over a basic trans positive post. And yes, I do think at least one user mentioned above was actively malicious.

Wtf, they banned you for "incivility" for your comments in the thread about removing downvotes? I didn't see you make even a single a comment that could even possibly be construed as incivility, I only saw you making reasonable arguments about something you're passionate about it. If that's what they think Hexbearian incivility looks like, then I can't imagine how they'd react to being on the wrong side of the dog pilings and dunkings we give to proper reactionaries.
If nothing else, I think our admin team needs to make a point to sit down and have a talk with lemmygrad's to hash this out and push for them to unban you and apologize for being overly dismissive of your valid concerns. I don't think this yet rises to level of requiring defederation, Lemmygrad is without a doubt the most similar forum to Hexbear on the entire internet, and it'd be a massive shame to lose all of their cool users. But eliminating transphobia is extremely important to us, and if lemmygrad cares about the union of our two communities, then they should be willing to compromise every once in a while. That doesn't necessarily mean removing downvotes, but it does mean taking a more pro-active stance on rooting out transphobia even if they haven't personally been effected by it enough to notice.
- I agree with this take. It's not a great situation, but it's not grounds for defederation. I understand that hexbear is a safe space but if we can't get along with lemmygrad, what does that say about us? Who can we get along with? I'm concerned that we're putting ourselves further into an "Us against the world" mindset by isolating ourselves like this, when realistically, the average hexbear user and the average lemmygrad user probably agree on >95% of issues. We're on the same side.
  I think lemmygrad is closely enough aligned with us that we can hopefully influence them to not be cringe debatebros, rather than abandoning the federation altogether. The place was made worse by GenZedong users, maybe it can be made better by hexbear users. Because again, if we can't work together with lemmygrad of all places, is there anyone we can work with?
- But eliminating transphobia is extremely important to us, and if lemmygrad cares about the union of our two communities, then they should be willing to compromise every once in a while. That doesn't necessarily mean removing downvotes, but it does mean taking a more pro-active stance on rooting out transphobia even if they haven't personally been effected by it enough to notice.
  I definitely agree. I had said my piece about why I thought it helps trans people a lot and tried to be fun about it, what I didn't need is a bunch of people goading me. I would like them to consider what might be better for trans people over vague notions of preserving site culture or whatever, though. If they have a better new idea that they want to try out I'm eager to see how it turns out.

Hard agree on the debatebro shit- I came here to get away from that, fuck civility.
- the trans people have come to "crybully" you. (yes, a lemmygrad poster said that of me)

I think your criticisms are valid. I also tend to just put all other instances in the same boat and feel like there are a lot of instances I'd rather see chopped before grad, but I understand having strong feelings about it considering they are supposed to actually be principled

As someone that owns a now failing web community from back in the days of fark and metafilter, I've been pleasantly surprised by how well removing downvotes has worked for Hexbear, but I think the reason it works is also because we have a strong admin/mod team that's not afraid to bring the hammer down reasonably quick and a user base that largely understands why that's necessary. I'm not sure it would work somewhere where people believe in that 'battling it out in the marketplace of ideas' bullshit, and honestly I'm not sure anything would work in that scenario. Downvotes at least give users the ability to try and repress fash bullshit from taking hold, but as long as we live in a world the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources are in the hands of people who have no accountability to truth, astroturfing and counter-revolutionary like agitation is always going to be something that requires a strong hand to snuff out. We see that out in the offline world with how China has to use the great firewall to handle NGOs and manufacturing consent; Enabling debate bro, 'both sides' bullshit is always going to be counter to safe spaces regardless of whether there's downvotes or not.
That's my long winded way of saying I agree with you, but I think it'll take more than removing downvotes, and it does seem like you've got valid concerns that make defederating something that needs to be considered .

Wait this is not a joke post?

i don't understand. just don't go to lemmygrad, stay on hexbear? am i missing something?

Fully agree on all points, federation was a mistake.

I looked at the source argument. My initial instinct was that maud_dibber, the admin you had a problem with, was not being expressly transphobic or even debatelordy and was coming at you in good faith. Since I'm cis, I didnt want to come at you with that perspective at first, but I ran it by my trans gf and she said she agreed with me. Thats one personal obviously, but full disclosure this girlfriend is a lemmygrad user who will remain anonymous. Maybe its worth considering that trans users of lemmygrad dont feel unsafe with the downvote feature in place like you do? And that its just a difference in culture?
- He said
  Also, I’m not, and I hope no one else would, go over to hexbear and demand they make changes, and start fights with everyone. We have our own site rules, and one of them is to be respectful to other comrades here. If you can’t disagree without being respectful, we won’t hesitate to issue temp bans.
  I didn't start a fight. I said my piece, and someone came out of the woodwork to debate me. I would like to point out that I was one of many posters that said it was a good idea, and that user chose me, a trans person, to reply to. It is not a good idea to debate someone on their personal experiences of harassment, and removing a potential vector for harassment is good. Another unfun fact, is that this is recurring behavior with this user, where they 'debate' a trans person, make them angry, and demand they be civil. The trans person then gets banned. I'm currently investigating further instances of this, some of which are from other trans hexbear users and even mods of /c/traa.
  The issue is the admin backed up the person doing this bad and transphobic behavior.
  
  So, I tried bringing this up with my gf and she got kinda angry and doesnt seem to have much patience for your perspective. She thinks you're ignoring the importance of dialectics and shouldnt have stepped in with your opinion if you weren't prepared to defend it.
  I dont want this to turn this into a proxy fight though (which I'm way to susceptible too) and she doesnt want to hear anymore about this anyway and dont feel comfortable stating opinions from my own angle because it feels like talking over so I'm just going to step out. This isnt a disengage you can still reply I just. Idk I feel very uncomfortable about this and I'm upset both that you're upset and my gf is upset so I need to step back and should probably not have gotten involved.

civility reasons
Lemmy.ml was extremely keen on civility bullshit too until they realised it was completely untenable.
When a marginalised person gets upset at a dickhead for marginalising them and you then utilise "civility" rules against that marginalised person, you are directly taking part in performing an action that marginalises them. You are an oppressor, siding with other oppressors.
It took some time to get that through to dessalines but I eventually cracked them and their modteam, I actively had to take up a deliberately combative stance and walk the line between daring them to ban me vs contributing in such a way that I was a person people did not want to ban due to making quality points. Hopefully this will get through to the lemmygrad team too.
- Supposedly this person, maud, IS dessalines. So...
  
  I don't know about that. However things are definitely different on one over the other.
  Whoever they are they need to get it together. The blanket implementation of civility rules just creates a tool people weaponise against others they can get a rise out of. Even if you ignore the issue with marginalised people you shouldn't write policy that can be utilised as a weapon within a community.

I agree that the responses you got in that thread were reddit tier bullshit.
That said, I don't think federation should be considered endorsement of an instance and likewise defederation shouldn't be treated as condemnation. Personally the value I see in federation is growing Hexbear, people who came to lemmy though other instances will see how we run things and some people will want to be a part of that. We won't get access to other safe spaces through federation because there aren't any others. (De)federation isn't a useful tool to attempt to change other instances either, they have decided what type of places they want to be and the leverage provided by federation is almost non-existent.
As far as I'm concerned, we can look at federation from a pragmatic perspective: if the trouble caused by another instance is enough to outweigh the possibility of bringing new converts it should be de-feded, otherwise we should stay federated. The other option would be to just dump federation entirely, as any instance that does not take creating a safe space as seriously as we do is detrimental to our ability to do so.

i agree that we should defederate. this shit is annoying and it is absolutely not hard to just have 2 accounts on 2 separate sites you wanna use

We need to get to solving the root cause of the problems.
First, OP is correct and we should defederate. The excuses given by the mods over there simply don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Second, even defederation doesn’t solve the problem. The core issue beneath this entire debacle is how do we moderate reactionary contents especially those that are hurtful to minorities on our sites.
Over there, someone proposed removing the downvote button because they suspected users from fash instances were mass downvoting their contents.
Over here, we have long eliminated the downvote button, but this is merely kicking the can down the road: just the other day, someone complained about why anti-semitic comments were allowed to stay up (i.e. not deleted, nobody reported to the mod team) and why were there users upvoting those comments?
Worse, it unnecessarily burdens the mod team and especially during high traffic period, with thousands of comments per day during the Israel-Gaza conflict, it is inevitable that some comments will be missed.
The real solution to the core issue (as I have also pointed out to them at the Lemmygrad thread), is to enable the feature that displays the users who did the upvotes and the downvotes. This solves both issues at once: who downvoted trans/LGBT content? Who upvoted anti-semitic comments? Everything is on full display and transparent, and everyone is fully accountable for their voting records. If you’re too ashamed to have your opinions on record, good, maybe you should think twice about why you’re feeling ashamed about pressing that up/downvote button in the first place.
It also shifts the burden of moderation away from the mod team to the community itself. We know this feature exists because the admin has banned someone before based on their mass downvote history of trans posts before. What needs to be done is to democratize this tool so the community has access to it as well.
Personally, I also like to see who upvote my comments (I will call you my comrades!) and who downvote them (look, a lib/chud) and I’m sure other users will benefit from it as well.
- I just want you to stop and consider the absolutely wild amount of drama that public upvotes and downvotes would enable. Holy shit it would be actually be amazing and we should do it
  
  I for one, welcome this incredible April Fool's day prank
  
  How so? If we can instantly tell who are the reactionaries that downvote trans contents, or that users from fash instances are the ones that upvote anti-semitic comments, that would absolutely solve the problem of moderating reactionary content on this site.
  We literally have a 200+ comment struggle session just the other day about why there are people anti-semitic comments are allowed to stay up and even have people upvoting them. A public record of up/downvotes instantly solves that problem.
  And once again, I will say this: if you are too ashamed to have your up/downvotes be known as a matter of public record, then you should think twice about why you feel so uncomfortable showing your support/opposition of certain opinions publicly in the first place.
  Remember our goals here are to make Hexbear a safe space for minorities who cannot find the same welcoming vibe elsewhere on the internet.
- Likes are public on twitter and facebook. Hasn't helped them at all.
  
  Twitter and Facebook aren’t built to be a discussion board where people discuss matters like we do here. Hexbear and Lemmy in general are more like reddit where the upvotes/downvotes reflect the consensus.

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