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.

  •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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    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.

    •  nick   ( @nick@campfyre.nickwebster.dev ) 
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      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.

    •  takeda   ( @takeda@kbin.social ) 
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      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.

      •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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        1410 months ago

        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@lemmy.nz.

        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).

    • 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.

      •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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        2210 months ago

        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.

          •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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            1010 months ago

            Lemmy 100% needs better mod tools. And user tools for that matter. Users being unable to block an instance is a pretty big hole.

            Some lemmy instances are trying to foster a friendly community, and really the only tool we have for this so far is to defederate until tools improve.

        •  liv   ( @liv@beehaw.org ) 
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          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.

          •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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            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.

            •  liv   ( @liv@beehaw.org ) 
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              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.

  •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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    I have temporary blocked hexbear so we can have the conversation in peace.

    Edit: Apparently I needed to hit save, so now we are temporarily defederated from hexbear.

    • 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.

      I think defederation should be a last resort.

      •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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        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.

        • 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.

          •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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            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.

              •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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                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.

  •  Fizz   ( @Fizz@lemmy.nz ) 
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    Every time I read a stupid comment and then check the instance 100% of the time it’s hexbear.

    So far I’ve not seen any rule breaking posts.

    Edit: I made this comment after only seeing hexbear users in few nz thread but after seeing more and seeing how the partcipate. I think we should defederate. They will never participate in good faith as they are an extremist instance. Majority of the big instances have already defederated with them so its not like we will be singling them out. On the point of “diverse viewpoints”, policy so far bans extreme right wing instances and extreme leftwing instances. All the reasonable view points that a hexbear user could provide can be provided by the many leftists across other instances.

      •  Fizz   ( @Fizz@lemmy.nz ) 
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        1010 months ago

        They’re anti nato communists and some socialists. I took a geez at their “why does everyone hate our instance thread” and it seems that in their words, since they have been on the platform for 3 years they have a strong instance culture. They are used to fighting and battling trolls so when they see something they don’t like they swarm on it and argue aggressively.

        From my opinion its a political community that focuses on pushing extreme left wing views. They are anti western, anti capitalism and anti racism and bigotry. I laughed because one of the reasons they keep giving for being hated is because “they’re always right”.

      •  biddy   ( @biddy@feddit.nl ) 
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        Tankies. They are pro authoritarian communist or socialist regimes like China and USSR, and anti western liberal capitalist democracies like US and NZ.

        They got banned from Reddit and moved to an isolated Lemmy instance long before the rest of Lemmy got big, but decided to experiment with federation fairly recently.

        • The only person in this thread that’s not engaging in good faith and trying to cause trouble is you.

          So what’s with the attitude in your other comment? Clearly these people have no plans to engage in good faith.

  •  Dave   ( @Dave@lemmy.nz ) 
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    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

    https://hexbear.net/comment/3833816

    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.

    But hey, it is what it is.

  • I have filtered out a lot of the spammer accounts that just spew nonsense.

    On one hand I’m lucky I can do that with sync. But on the other hand we shouldn’t have to resort to whackamole.

  •  murl   ( @murl@lemmy.nz ) 
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    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.

  • If you’re going to defederate from everyone that’s stupid, you’re going to be very alone. And then there’s the technical difficulty of having to defederate from yourself.

    Might I suggest that next time you spawn, you do so on a planet that does have intelligent life? Kind of pointless to complain about idiots when you were the one that decided to be a human just before planetary annihilation.

    • 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.

  • 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.