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.
So as an update, Hexbear have defederated us after a brief chat I had with an admin. They updated their instance on it here:
Removed lemmy.nz from our allow-list due to irreconcilable political differences between the instances. As well as them committing to permanently blocking hexbear.net
That’s not quite how I remember the conversation going, in fact I feel like I said it wasn’t permanent (or at least that’s what I was trying to imply):
Thanks for reaching out. I do intend to monitor the situation, in particular when more granular tools are available. But for the moment I think we will just watch from the side lines.
Have lemmy.nz reached out to hexbear? Do they know that their bombastic persona can be overwhelming for a small instance? Sounds corny but maybe we just ask them to go easy.
They aren’t ever going to chill out. Their entire purpose is to brigade, attack, harass, and argue in bad faith. The admins pretend to care about this, but they’re in on it as shown by this image. They’re getting defederated a lot right now because they cannot ever behave.
Seems like a good move. It’s a crap dynamic at this point. Maybe later we could re-federate once the numbers aren’t so skewed. If people from there feel the need to discuss NZ issues they still have options. They can join here. They can make their own NZ sub if NZ issues are so important to them.
I’d be fine with defederating. I don’t care if they bring in more numbers and more ‘engagement’ if that engagement is generally shit and too difficult for the mods to moderate with the current tools available. I’d much rather be part of a smaller but friendly community that is actually familiar with NZ, than a larger more popular one that just turns into another cesspit.
I do not support defederating. I want diverse viewpoints. I suppor5 inclusivity. I don’t mind offensive posts. I can block them myself if I don’t want to see them. Please don’t speak for me.
Yes and no. We are here on lemmy.nz, a locally focused instance. Many users want to participate in NZ related content, and may be from NZ, even if their accounts are not on lemmy.nz. If hexbear is defederated, then they won’t be able to participate in any of the NZ communities, and this impacts all users wanting to participate here.
With that said, this (original) post has less than 1/4 of the up/down votes from users subscribed to this community, and an even smaller fraction are lemmy.nz users, so for sure there are a lot of people participating in this thread that are not invested in the outcome.
In the end the decision is up to lemmy.nz, a random user from lemm.ee should in my opinion not have a vote in such a discussion.
The same goes for me, feddit.de has already defederated from hexbear, so I can’t even see any of their comments on this thread.
A big problem with Hexbear is that downvoting is disabled on their side, resulting in a lot more comments due to users being unable to disagree with something through the voting system. Should downvotes become enabled, Hexbear would become a lot more bearable to outside instances.
There is a big difference in attitude, huh? I don’t care so much about who was wrong/right in that thread but aggressively namecalling and strawmanning people over something as irrelevant as the name of a street is just toxic behaviour.
As an afterthought, perhaps if they want to stop being defederated by instances they should have a good long think about how they interact with other communities. Shitposting can be fun but it’s stupid and rude when you’re entering someone else’s space.
There was a huge difference in the tone of conversation before and after dave’s temporary defederating, both on the topic of defederating, and the discussion that kicked all this off.
Actually after reading the context, I don’t agree with OP at all. I want more places to have Te Reo names, and I want people who dislike it to complain so they can be shut down. I love Te Reo and I want to defend it.
Setting aside the Te Reo argument, in my opinion the OP is guilty of much of what they accuse others of and appears to taunt others into further participation (again, my opinion). If lemmy.nz is going to become a closed community, it will simply become an echo chamber of that closed community - this is the biggest failure of social media - is that what users want lemmy.nz to become?
Keep it open. If it becomes a closed community, I’ll probably wander off.
I suspect Lemmy will grow (or die) to allow those that create continual problems to be banned or similar - perhaps we just need to wait a little longer for those features? Defederation seems far too coarse/broad brush to me for what I perceive to be, at this point in time, just a nuisance that can be ignored.
I like having an instance that isn’t defederated from too much (except CSAM) because I enjoy being able to see and subscribe to what I want. Hexbear is a shitty place, but I don’t like the idea of defederating because my feewings got hurt. I would prefer defederating because it’s a legal/human rights necessity.
Honestly if someone wants to point out how awful Hexbear is, op posted some poor examples.
If you spend a little time there you’ll see things more along the lines of “you’re gonna get the wall when we start the revolution” with a ton of upvotes.
That other thread reminds me of of every time a white teacher couldn’t be bothered with learning the pronunciation my name, or any other black child’s name for that matter, from elementary all the way to high school. that shit was fuckin racist.
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.
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 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 !newzealand.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you’re getting that worked up about mild non-offensive inane comments I hate to imagine how worked up you get using a self-checkout machine. Chill out.
Weird claim since you seem to repeat things a lot, including repeating things I’ve said back to me. You talk exactly like the guy we’ve had an issue with on Lemmy.ml who keeps making alts with AI profile pics.
you don't know the word papa? kangaroo? horohoro is two sounds repeated once.
you're either the laziest or stupidest person in the world. my vote is both.
or just a run of the mill, boring as fuck racist. I guess that's actually my vote as you are entirely unimpressive and mediocre, not even the best at being stupid or lazy
Hi, not trying to start a fight but thought you might be interested; “kangaroo” has no relevance here.
It’s ka-nga: “ka” - like the English word “car” but without the R - and “nga” which also rhymes with car and has a soft g like in the English word “sing”, not a hard g like in “kangaroo.”
Nga might be a bit harder for you, but all kiwis know how to pronounce it, it’s the nga in common names like Ngaire and Ngati and “Tutira Mai Nga Iwi”.
Please place item in bagging area. Are you using your own bags? [Yes]. Please wait for staff member to come over and give you permission to use your own bags. Would you like a receipt? [No]. Please take this 30 centimetre long piece of receipt paper that isn’t a receipt, it’s just printed with stuff you don’t want.
I don’t think it’s justified getting all upset about a few comments, but if I saw an article about someone getting arrested for smashing a self-checkout machine then I’d assume the machine probably deserved it.
They’re beyond annoying for sure, but I use them every chance I get. My grocery bill has gone way down since I’ve learned how to use self checkout… properly.
It constantly thinks I’ve placed an improper amount of weight and I’m stealing. As if I’d steal at the most watched area of the store like a chump. And the attendant has to come over four times!
It’s not like I put the chocolate bar in my pocket while I was standing at the self-checkout? Obviously I did that before going to the place with all the staff.
And who’s gonna watch the video surveilance to make sure I didn’t scan my kumara in as onions?
Pretty common for narcissists to perceive the world as a crowd of bullies working against them. I hope you’re not a grown man acting like this on here.
No, but they have absolutely flooded the thread. They certainly got antagonistic in the previous thread though, basically calling everyone who disagrees with them racist.
You are the one in that thread getting hun up on a te Reo name when Te Reo is an official language (the only written in Law - English is only a common language as far as I understand), they, and others have called out the developers and you fo a quite an easy Te Reo name.
I have seen issues with 111 having issues with an English street name - Dick st. It took three calls to get EMS to attend because the first two went to (i guess) the same controller who insisted that Dick st was a prank call.
I don’t like how they exclusively use memes, and seem to group post, but on the issue of the street name I think you are in the wrong.
English is an official language. All our laws etc. are in English so we didn’t need to make a law to make it official like with te reo (and NZ sign language).
But agree with your main point, there’s no problem with the name.
At any rate the fact that the te reo version of the treaty is recognised as primary doesn’t mean all nz law is written in te reo as you initially claimed
Even as a white gen x-er with probable dyslexia I would possibly have issues spelling spelling not living there, but if you lived there I really can’t see the problem with papa-kanga-horo-horo (shit, look at that I spelt that correctly first time [yes I looked it to check])
It's eight syllables, but I think most minds would chunk it out as three or four units of short term memory ("papa", "kanga", "horo" or even "horohoro") which isn't too unreasonable to me compared to some more ...western sounding? place names.
(Though I am not the person you were responding to nor do I have experience with Maori. Just sharing my take)
If we want to pronounce it properly we do it “Papa” - “ka” - “nga” - “horo” “horo”.
I’d predict people who want to mangle it will probably go for something like “Paper” “kanga” “hoaro” (with a hard g like in kangaroo, argh) and leave the last bit off.
Paraparaumu gets called “Parrer Pram” by people who don’t pronounce their reo. Not all of whom are pakeha I might add.
I’ve read the various comments about it and have no idea why you would have to defederate with them. As long as they play by the rules it should be fine. Just downvote if you don’t agree. The voting system will take care of it.
Currently less than 1/4 of the votes on this post (the post itself) are from users subscribed to this community. Hexbear users far outnumber us, it’s not even remotely close. With 5 out of the 8 instances with over 1000 monthly active users having defederated them, we are showing up much higher in their All feed. Lemmy.world defederated them, and they have more users than all the other 7/8 put together. Over 2/3rds of lemmy content is no longer available to them, so they see our posts about random NZ stuff, and decide to comment on them. Because there are so many of them, it floods the posts.
Basically, it takes us from being a community of NZ and NZ-adjacent people, to being a community of international hexbear users talking about NZ. It completely changes the tone of the instance.
It’s not something they have done (other than whatever made the others want to defederate), but the point of the fediverse is to curate who you federate with in order to build the community you want, then people join the instances that curate the way they want. I’m not so keen on a community of hexbear users talking about NZ. The occasional one was fine, but to have our threads swamped is just not what I’m here for.
Also, hexbear users are filling all the posts from different instances trying to decide if people want to defederate or not. It’s bad taste.
I try not to be a “my way or the highway” kind of guy, but I haven’t yet seen a good counter-argument to my other post.
Hi Dave. You make some very good points and you seem like a reasonable guy. I’d like to weigh in with some additional context from another server that is currently wrestling with this question.
Of the top 8 servers, lemmy.ml, lemm.ee, and sh.itjust.works are the three that have not defederated hexbear. Ironically, hexbear chose not to federate with sh.itjust.works when they connected to the rest of Lemmy, so although we never defederated them, they don’t see our content. I see all of their comments on other instances, but they never see me/us, and thus never harass our users directly. I take a strange pride in the fact that the current boogeyman of Lemmy was actually scared to federate with SJW 😅
Unfortunately for you, it also means that hexbears are only seeing content from 2 of the 8 largest instances. They have 1.6k MAUs. You guys only have 140. Lemm.ee has 3.7k, lemmy.ml has 2.9k, and SJW has 2.3k.
In my view, the hexbear community is actually a positive force on this platform. They are frequently abrasive, but they ultimately have the potential to contribute to what we are building here. They are extremely active and some of them are quite intelligent. But they’ve also become accustomed to a privileged position on their own walled-in platform, and they need to be reminded that their views are considered very extreme by the average person.
It seems to me that the actual content posted by hexbears is not necessarily the problem, but rather it’s the volume of comments and upvotes that disrupts the natural flow of the community, causing people such as yourselves to feel as if you’re being brigaded. I think with the support of hexbear admins and some time to adjust, hexbear users could learn to be less overbearing in terms of their engagement with content on other instances.
My general position is that this would best be resolved by speaking directly to the hexbear admins and requesting for them to control the behavior of their users. That being said, the specific transgressions referenced in this post are quite mild, imho.
You obviously need to do what is right for your own users, but I tend to view events from a strategic perspective, and my assessment is that hexbear users can be a benefit for Lemmy, and it’s not too much of a burden to work through these minor conflicts and try to bring them under the same roof with the rest of Lemmy. It’s contingent on them being cooperative and reasonable, but surely they deserve a chance to prove that they can be?
I’ve had a lot of conversations over the past day or so. I feel my view changing from one of the volume being a problem, to more that past actions are a problem.
Hexbear has done something to get defederated from 5 of the largest servers. Largely Lemmy is politically left (as was reddit), and I would argue a larger portion of Lemmy users are leftist (compared to reddit). My understanding is that Hexbear, as a whole, are not fascist-left, and I don’t think anti-capitalist views are hard to find on Lemmy. My point being: I don’t think their political viewpoint is the reason 5 of the 8 largest servers defederated them.
It’s contingent on them being cooperative and reasonable, but surely they deserve a chance to prove that they can be?
If this is the case, and they are willing to work towards a world where they can coexist on Lemmy, I feel they should be working with the large instances to prove this. This is much more beneficial to the wider Lemmy ecosystem, and seems to me to be a solution to our problem. If they work with large instances to get federated, it proves they are serious about being responsible members of the Lemmy federation. And if they build the trust of larger instances to the point of being federated with them again, it helps our issue of being too visible.
I can’t see from the two threads I read through anything particular bad or offensive. Are you able to give some examples of where you feel their dialogue is impeding lemmy.nz in some way?
I stopped using my lemmy.world account nearly as much after they started blocking a bunch that I was interested in, and I’d hate to see that going on here, but if there are valid examples I’d like to see them.
So the last few days we have had explosions of comments on some posts, and some of my experience is from posts and communities on other instances, but having come to this post not long after it was posted, and seeing comments like “sounds like the crackers should go back to europe if they dont like it. “too long” fuck off street names over 15-letters are the norm where i live”.
They popped into a post about a name in NZ on an NZ instance to call people racist names.
You and I may have different ideas about what is ok, or possibly the comment has been drowned out by the attention the post got so it’s not so obvious anymore, but to me that is not a thoughtful comment in a friendly community.
Yeah, had to scroll way down to see the comments, but although I think they are a bit dumb, there were other hexbear comments in that thread I agreed with. I’m generally in favour of keeping the community open, supposing you have the ability to ban the trolls if you think it needs it (no idea if you can do that in Lemmy). Defederating just seems like a big step, and your right I find those comments mildly offensive at best but of course it’s your server so up to you the standard you want to keep.
On the votes front, I believe as the admin you can see the vote counts? Are the really outweighing the local voices? Or is the proportion of lemmy.nz vs other instances consistent over time? I previously used my lemmy.world account to access lemmy.nz, and I imagine there are loads of people with accounts on different instances.
Given the low numbers currently I think finding ways to be more open is good, but I can also appreciate not wanting to deal with shitty behaviour.
Yeah, had to scroll way down to see the comments, but although I think they are a bit dumb, there were other hexbear comments in that thread I agreed with.
This is one thing I struggle with. Some posts by hexbear users are so thoughtful, while others are so flippant.
I’m generally in favour of keeping the community open, supposing you have the ability to ban the trolls if you think it needs it (no idea if you can do that in Lemmy). Defederating just seems like a big step, and your right I find those comments mildly offensive at best but of course it’s your server so up to you the standard you want to keep.
What I want for a community isn’t “not offensive”, but actively friendly.
On the votes front, I believe as the admin you can see the vote counts? Are the really outweighing the local voices? Or is the proportion of lemmy.nz vs other instances consistent over time? I previously used my lemmy.world account to access lemmy.nz, and I imagine there are loads of people with accounts on different instances.
I can see the votes in the database. I’ve only checked specifically this post (and not any comments under it), but last I checked there were 23 voters subscribed to !newzealand out of 169 votes. That’s regardless of which server their account is on.
I haven’t checked this for previous posts. That could be an interesting thing to check, to see if it’s unusual (the volume of votes is certainly unusual).
Given the low numbers currently I think finding ways to be more open is good, but I can also appreciate not wanting to deal with shitty behaviour.
I posted a reply here, that’s a little different than my attitude up to now, but I think it’s still a reasonable path forward - though again anything is only a proposal at this point.
That’s a really interesting read. Also blown away by how low user numbers are still. I haven’t been back on Reddit since the 3rd party app shutdown, and I know plenty of others have left. Makes it seem more important to me to build community but it’s a tricky balance to strike.
Thanks for your thoughtful responses. I am enjoying having the kiwi community to interact with so your obviously doing something right.
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