Please follow lemmy.ml and stand up to the big guys and defederate in whatever form it comes. This is a chance to finally stand alone from the Mega corps and have some peace and quiet.
Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.
The only other thing I will say is that I genuinely appreciate that you’re building this community with your userbase and having these conversations, it’s the correct way to create a unique community culture and have people care about the space.
I’m not a lemm.ee user, but I support defederation should Meta decide to permit access to Lemmy instances. We’re here to escape Silicon Valley, not look for opportunities to invite them to dinner.
It sounds like you actually care about all of this. Thanks for making a refugee camp for us. Keep being professional about it and I’m sure you will nurture a great community.
I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don’t have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.
This was why my eyebrows raised when I saw the Hexbear admin response when they claim that “Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods”. Kremlin propaganda is rife in communities like chapotraphouse, and it certainly seems like the mods there let anything slide as long as it is isn’t outright incitement to violence.
I challenged claims made in a couple of different anti-Ukraine posts and despite the fact there were maybe one or two users whose responses were thoughtful, the majority were outright calling me an idiot and a retarded liberal (edit: correction; dumb fuck)
So far, my impression of HB’s userbase is pretty negative because the posts on there that make the front page here tend to be the more shit-posty ones.
That said, I appreciate @sunaurus for the stance he’s taking. There is some positive and thoughtful content on HB - you just have to block the noisier and more idiotic communities so it doesn’t get drowned out.
Thanks for that very thoughtful statement. I am fine with keeping them federated and letting individual users block what they don’t want to see. I find it interesting to see what different communities have to say, even if I find it abhorrent.
I’d like to stay federated with hexbear. They bring important information to conversation that people are otherwise not exposed to. American school-taught history is NOT the gold standard in truth.
I feel a little sorry for the Lemm.ee users here that came to make measured, personal posts specific to the annoucement. There’s a fair amount of long off-topic arguements happening in bits of the thread now and that probably makes it harder to read and manage.
This is something that’s often been pointed to as a pure result of Hexbear users or federation with Hexbear and given rise to accusations of ‘brigading here and in the past’. While I don’t think every segue into debate has been useful here, and have also told comrades that I didn’t think this was the place for specific comments (which they removed) I also think there’s some important context to point out - and I hope it helps lemm.ee users wondering about all this traffic not to fall into the trap of assuming the worst based on a couple of comments:
Hexbear is a very big and very active instance. A very small proportion of users posting in a thread (especially one explicitly about them) can seem like a lot to a lot of instances.
Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes and Hexbear users do not have the ability to downvote posts or comments on other instances. This creates a culture where if people disagree, they tend to reply, not downvote instead. Another reason we’re very active.
This thread has constantly been at the top of people’s feeds on Hexbear. if they’re not only set to ‘local’.
Finally - and I say this fully acknowledging and appriciating the many ordinary, good faith, pleasant lemm.ee commenters that I’ve enjoyed reading and talking too even when I totally disagreed with them - a lot of these off-topic arguements and more heated comments do not come from nowhere. While not at all the majority, I do see a pretty shocking amount of actively hostile, hateful, and insulting behaviour here. Sadly, quite a bit of it would be banned under Hexbear’s moderation policy against things like slurs and hate speech too.
So try to keep in mind if you see salty Hexbear users replying to people that, just in reading through this thread myself, I’ve the following instances of abuse or smears against my comrades (and they continue popping up). So I absolutely support them defending themselves (as long as they stay within the rules here):
Dimissal as the pejorative “tankie” - 4 times (although we actually think this one is pretty funny usually)
Users stating that Hexbear users are propagandists - 8 times
Stating that people from Hexbear are specifically paid Russian/Chinese bots/propagandists - 10 times
Direct equivalences of Hexbear posters to Nazis or just straight up calling us Nazis/fascists - 7 times
Insults regarding mental health or IQ that would be classed as ablism on Hexbear - 8 times
Dismissing users as children - 2 times
Claiming Hexbear users are using vote-manipulation (impossible, as explained above) - 4 times
Accusations of deliberate brigading rather than just commenting, being active - 11 times
I’ve tried not to count repeated instances from the same users. But sadly that’s not all. Just a handful of the following are comments that have been made against Hexbear users in this thread, without any kind of equal hostility. As far as I can tell they all still remain:
“You guys are like cancer”
“Braindead fucking tankies”
“Get fucked”
“Asshole” (multiple)
That our beliefs are “moralistic bullshut”
That some of our beliefs are “a criminal ideology”
A comment that simply states “No Russians”
That we’re “evil” (multiple times)
An elaborate comparison to us “vandalising a Jewish graveyard” and other Nazi equivalences
And of course a comment that explictly minimised the Nazi death toll with glee, seeming to imply they should have killed more. On the subject of disagreeing with equating the hammer and sickle to the swastika (hidden with spoiler tag, for those who don’t want to see it repeated)…
spoiler
“you are right, it is nor really fair to nazis, who killed measly 17 million people, compared to impressive 100 million killed by communists.”
There’s also been numerious instances of users misgendering Hexbear users. I’m not going to put all of these down to malice, but at Hexbear we display our pronouns for a reason - we love our trans comrades! You don’t have to, but could you please at least respect them and not misgender them?
Again, this isn’t the majority, but it’s honestly disappointing and worth keeping in mind amongst some of the louder, minority yells of ‘brigading’ etc.
I’m excited by the potential of the fediverse, and I want the fediverse to grow. That means more users. However, the noncommercial nature of the fediverse is why I’m excited by it in the first place. I couldn’t care less if there’s yet another gigantic social network full of ads.
Allowing any profit-driven interest to influence the fediverse risks destroying what makes the fediverse interesting and special. I’m not willing to risk the fediverse in order to grow it.
I posted a comment in the_dunk_tank without noticing where I was. While many people were heated over what I said, it was a misunderstanding due to a lack of specificity and ignorance on my part. After I clarified what I was intending to say, discussion ensued and it was ended on good terms.
The vast majority of users I interact with from hexbear are thoughtful, insightful, kind and genuine individuals that care deeply about humanity and moving forward. The hate that they have is for fascism and actual fascists.
To defederate hexbear would be a disservice to the idea of federated social media.
Personally I say just leave hosting of images to dedicated sites for that purpose. Your efforts are better left to dealing with how to render them. That being said, I use to be in charge of managing abuse on a site that has an average of 20 million posts a month (seriously).
The way I essentially defeated these kinds of attacks was with an image scanning service. It scans for anything NSFW and blocks it. Sometimes things would make it through but once an admin flagged it we could use that to block the users IP and account. It’s not cheap but the volume is also not huge yet for lemm.ee so it might not be too bad.
I think this is a great move until we have something rock solid to prevent this. There are tons of image hosting sites you can use (most of which have the resources to already try to prevent this stuff) so it shouldn’t really cause much inconvenience.
This particular community was removed this morning.
I don’t want to go into too many details, but suffice it to say that this is not the first time the responsible users (or, potentially, single user with multiple accounts) has tried to cause disruptions on lemm.ee, so this is why they have been banned from lemm.ee as well.
I know the community is still visible on sh.itjust.works. The reason for this is most likely technical - either the community removal action did not get received properly by that instance, or the fact that one of the mods was a user of that instance has prevented the removal from being acknowledged by sh.itjust.works. Either way, lemm.ee is not hosting this community anymore.
Please follow lemmy.ml and stand up to the big guys and defederate in whatever form it comes. This is a chance to finally stand alone from the Mega corps and have some peace and quiet.
Nsfw, Nsfl, and “Porn”
I like nsfw memes but dont want my feed full of porn. I have a seperate account for porn.
As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.
The only other thing I will say is that I genuinely appreciate that you’re building this community with your userbase and having these conversations, it’s the correct way to create a unique community culture and have people care about the space.
This is sick. Kudos to mods for dealing with this garbage. I hope the posters are all hunted down and punished.
I’m not a lemm.ee user, but I support defederation should Meta decide to permit access to Lemmy instances. We’re here to escape Silicon Valley, not look for opportunities to invite them to dinner.
It sounds like you actually care about all of this. Thanks for making a refugee camp for us. Keep being professional about it and I’m sure you will nurture a great community.
This was why my eyebrows raised when I saw the Hexbear admin response when they claim that “Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods”. Kremlin propaganda is rife in communities like chapotraphouse, and it certainly seems like the mods there let anything slide as long as it is isn’t outright incitement to violence.
I challenged claims made in a couple of different anti-Ukraine posts and despite the fact there were maybe one or two users whose responses were thoughtful, the majority were outright calling me an idiot and a
retarded liberal(edit: correction; dumb fuck)So far, my impression of HB’s userbase is pretty negative because the posts on there that make the front page here tend to be the more shit-posty ones.
That said, I appreciate @sunaurus for the stance he’s taking. There is some positive and thoughtful content on HB - you just have to block the noisier and more idiotic communities so it doesn’t get drowned out.
If you don’t defederate we might as well go back to reddit. I don’t want to see posts from instagram accounts
Thanks for that very thoughtful statement. I am fine with keeping them federated and letting individual users block what they don’t want to see. I find it interesting to see what different communities have to say, even if I find it abhorrent.
I’d like to stay federated with hexbear. They bring important information to conversation that people are otherwise not exposed to. American school-taught history is NOT the gold standard in truth.
I feel a little sorry for the Lemm.ee users here that came to make measured, personal posts specific to the annoucement. There’s a fair amount of long off-topic arguements happening in bits of the thread now and that probably makes it harder to read and manage.
This is something that’s often been pointed to as a pure result of Hexbear users or federation with Hexbear and given rise to accusations of ‘brigading here and in the past’. While I don’t think every segue into debate has been useful here, and have also told comrades that I didn’t think this was the place for specific comments (which they removed) I also think there’s some important context to point out - and I hope it helps lemm.ee users wondering about all this traffic not to fall into the trap of assuming the worst based on a couple of comments:
So try to keep in mind if you see salty Hexbear users replying to people that, just in reading through this thread myself, I’ve the following instances of abuse or smears against my comrades (and they continue popping up). So I absolutely support them defending themselves (as long as they stay within the rules here):
I’ve tried not to count repeated instances from the same users. But sadly that’s not all. Just a handful of the following are comments that have been made against Hexbear users in this thread, without any kind of equal hostility. As far as I can tell they all still remain:
spoiler
“you are right, it is nor really fair to nazis, who killed measly 17 million people, compared to impressive 100 million killed by communists.”
There’s also been numerious instances of users misgendering Hexbear users. I’m not going to put all of these down to malice, but at Hexbear we display our pronouns for a reason - we love our trans comrades! You don’t have to, but could you please at least respect them and not misgender them?
Again, this isn’t the majority, but it’s honestly disappointing and worth keeping in mind amongst some of the louder, minority yells of ‘brigading’ etc.
I’m excited by the potential of the fediverse, and I want the fediverse to grow. That means more users. However, the noncommercial nature of the fediverse is why I’m excited by it in the first place. I couldn’t care less if there’s yet another gigantic social network full of ads.
Allowing any profit-driven interest to influence the fediverse risks destroying what makes the fediverse interesting and special. I’m not willing to risk the fediverse in order to grow it.
I posted a comment in the_dunk_tank without noticing where I was. While many people were heated over what I said, it was a misunderstanding due to a lack of specificity and ignorance on my part. After I clarified what I was intending to say, discussion ensued and it was ended on good terms.
The vast majority of users I interact with from hexbear are thoughtful, insightful, kind and genuine individuals that care deeply about humanity and moving forward. The hate that they have is for fascism and actual fascists.
To defederate hexbear would be a disservice to the idea of federated social media.
deleted by creator
Another Reddit refugee here - thanks for setting up this instance.
Personally I say just leave hosting of images to dedicated sites for that purpose. Your efforts are better left to dealing with how to render them. That being said, I use to be in charge of managing abuse on a site that has an average of 20 million posts a month (seriously).
The way I essentially defeated these kinds of attacks was with an image scanning service. It scans for anything NSFW and blocks it. Sometimes things would make it through but once an admin flagged it we could use that to block the users IP and account. It’s not cheap but the volume is also not huge yet for lemm.ee so it might not be too bad.
I think this is a great move until we have something rock solid to prevent this. There are tons of image hosting sites you can use (most of which have the resources to already try to prevent this stuff) so it shouldn’t really cause much inconvenience.
There is a difference between calling someone subhuman which is the rhetoric of people that believe that various races of humanity are more human than others(fascist master race rhetoric) vs calls to eat the rich through the use of guillotine memes. The latter is just radical and militant activism. The former is fascist rhetoric. The latter also has a place in mainstream society already as something that is regularly the centerpiece of art.
This particular community was removed this morning.
I don’t want to go into too many details, but suffice it to say that this is not the first time the responsible users (or, potentially, single user with multiple accounts) has tried to cause disruptions on lemm.ee, so this is why they have been banned from lemm.ee as well.
I know the community is still visible on sh.itjust.works. The reason for this is most likely technical - either the community removal action did not get received properly by that instance, or the fact that one of the mods was a user of that instance has prevented the removal from being acknowledged by sh.itjust.works. Either way, lemm.ee is not hosting this community anymore.
This is why I do not believe in free speech absolutism.
Nazi shit, pedo shit, etc. should not be tolerated and there is absolutely nothing wrong with silencing these sick fucks.