Honestly I think the hexbear situation may need to be revisited based on recent observations where among other things an instance admin lied to another instance admin. Even lemmygrad.ml had this to say about it:

The last few days have honestly shaken my faith in Hexbear and their team and I hope the mods and admins at Lemmygrad are monitoring the situation closely.

Personally I want every single diversity of opinion to be able to be shared… so long as it is offered in good faith. Which HB is demonstrably not doing, even to admins of other instances. (That said, I don’t always want to see it all of the time either - like porn, it would be good to be able to turn it off if I don’t want it flooding my feed 100% of the time? Which after defederation, that is what I have bc you don’t need an account just to lurk on content from an instance.) Ofc that’s up to you all on lemm.ee to decide for yourselves, not us as outsiders, I was just offering my personal opinion since we were discussing it and it’s good to be upfront with my biases:-).

I don’t know as much about lemmygrad.ml tbh - that whole defederation issue predates me, although on StarTrek.website I did make the mistake of replying to a comment in a post that I found while browsing All that made me wish that I had never heard of the place. It might have been something along the lines of saying that at least Biden had lowered gasoline prices which helped poorer people and thereby that aided getting Democrats into the USA Senate during the midterms, and how while nowhere near enough it at least was a strategic move that wasn’t “nothing”… but whatever I said, the response I got was EXACTLY like when I accidentally did the same to a comment in ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net - I got an enormous FLOOD of responses filling up by Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. I did not feel like I fully consented to that level of vitriol and hate in return for what I intended as at least an attempt to better understand a complex situation.

Anyway if full defederation is the only way to prevent such content from showing up in every new person’s feed, then so be it. Although I actually would rather have an opt-in system based on proper labeling than a “hard defederate”, it’s just that such is not made available to us by the developers of the codebase (although PieFed has it, yet the flagship instance PieFed.social has defederated from those two instances already). So since the only options allowed are full defederation vs. help spread all of their content without offering any warning to new users, and not only content but their echo chamber fueled hatred and vitriol towards any opinion that is less extreme than theirs… then defederation it is that seems the best course of action moving forwards, imho.

And perhaps that is what keeps people from putting communities onto lemmy.ee? Knowing full well that the hexbears and lemmygrads will be able to brigade it? If so, it’s fine for lemm.ee to remain as a general instance - again it’s up to you all who are on it to decide what you want for yourselves - I was just curious to think about the potential reasons why. Also I think it’s great to have at least one instance in the Fediverse that is that way, and it would be a loss if it were to change. Then again, hexbear admins lying to admins of another instance… at that point the argument put forth that at least the admins were better behaved than the average user seems no longer true, and that the instance might not be trustworthy any longer in the future? Reaching out in full friendliness is awesome! But not in the face of such bad faith behaviors in return.

I agree on the rest - about people wanting to be more consumers and less contributers, in large part (from what I hear) due to the current state of the moderation tools that apparently are quite poor, and all the more so across different instances, which in lemm.ee’s case would be exaggerated since to keep up the standards of a community the mod would have to remove content from hexbears.

Authoritarians are bad but lemme just stick up for Russia and Iran mmmkay.

From my position, the jedi are evil!

Man, they weren’t kidding about those federation issues. Just now got the notification here. Listen, you’re not wrong that people are reactionaries, this is the internet. Many people need to either figure out they aren’t welcome, or figure out a less confrontational way to present their ideas (me included, often).

But all that said: there’s a difference between “I think anarchists are largely naive at best” and “This person is a tankie”. I can (and frequently do) disagree with all manner of left-slash political opinions, and I’m perfectly happy to coexist with them since they often have perfectly good ideas that come from a position I disagree with, but can accept.

What I can’t abide, and what the above asshole espouses, is the brainless regurgitation of pro-russian propaganda. Ideas like “enabling the AFU’s continued defense of Ukraine is unconscionable and the guilt for all the innocent deaths lay at the feet of NATO for enabling this war to continue” are what makes someone a tankie, and are what that person keeps saying. That’s the shit they get pushback on (and which they fail to understand the negative reactions to), because they’re too self-centered to realize that Ukranians aren’t some innocent babes in the wood lead astray by a wolf. They are a people who have fought and died, for hundreds of years, to secure their fucking right to choose the fates they make for themselves. The choice to lay down one’s life for a cause they believe in, that they dictate, is one every culture holds absolutely sacred. How many martyred anarchists are there, who’s names live on in the creed of those who come after them? I’m not even an anarchist and I can think of dozens.

A situation has arisen which has lead so, so many to make that choice, and while every life lost here is a tragedy I grieve over every day, infantilizing the people who’s lives are freely given? The people who’s lives are being stolen from them? The ones who’ve been found with their hands still bound, dumped in mass graves? The busses full of stolen children, who will never be seen again?

THAT is what makes this jackass a fucking tankie.

Ah yes, the “no u” gambit. Classic, deadly, refined. The most elegant of rebuttals. A refuge for only the sharpest of wits.

Anyways, do you mean different views like say, someone holding different (and by your own admission, quite common) opinions about how your conduct reflects on your character…?

They’re not calling you that for having different views. They’re calling you that for making up reasons to offend yourself and acting like a toxic drama queen. And the ratio shows they aren’t alone.

Sure, but it does speak to that user’s definition, which is what they were talking about. And honestly, their definition is pretty much the standard. ‘A pejorative term for supporters of authoritarian regimes, particularly communist ones’ is the definition in some form across every site I’ve turned up in the thirty seconds I spent on this. It’s what everyone else in this thread appears to be using. Seems like its pretty agreed on.