Credit to https://literature.cafe/u/Janvier
Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear’s politics.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I’ve come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I’ve split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy’s 10k character post limit.
1/5 – The Threadiverse is shrinking
There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn’t enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It’s visible in the active user data, as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There’s a couple of obvious culprits for this:
Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software
Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience.
Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences.
This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in.
2/5 – Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance
I support your account of Hexbear’s predecessor. I don’t share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear’s current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience.
Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of ‘enlightened’ centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press’ attention, perhaps they didn’t want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That’s how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances.
With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They’ve developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you’re transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there’s not a better place on the web to be.
While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation.
3/5 – Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse’s killer feature
Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success.
So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That’s obviously up to the admin(s), but it can’t be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow.
Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I’ve alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy’s codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them.
Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.
Thanks for adding to the context.
I’m new to Hexbear but I’ve been Hexbear-adjacent for a long time, being in the orbit of chapo subreddits etc.
I used to do a significant amount of online antifascist activism by hounding the alt-/far-right on Reddit, getting profiles banned, infiltrating private subreddits, getting subs taken down via reporting, baiting the most active far-right users into harassing me and attempting to dox me to soak up their efforts in order to divert them away from more vulnerable targets and the like.
I’m not Jewish but from my experiences with the activism I was engaged in online, you’re absolutely right that Reddit was a hotbed of anti-Semitism (of course anti-Semitism being one of the thin ends of what is effectively the wedge of fascism.) I can’t speak to what the culture is like on Reddit in recent years because I had to disengage from that activism for personal reasons.
I guess I just wanted to voice my own anecdotal experience to reaffirm what you’ve said about Reddit and I wanted to let you know that, although it can be extremely isolating to be exposed to that stuff or, worse yet, to be personally targeted by these groups online, there are people out there who are actively involved in rooting out virulent anti-Semitism in social media spaces.
Unfortunately most of that work goes completely unseen and accounts or online groups often get banned weeks or months after the fact, and it’s not like you’d get notified of when and why it happens. They just get disappeared into the memory hole. And of course the people who are doing this work aren’t reaching out to folks like yourself to let you know what work they’re doing because that would come off as self-aggrandizing and it can compromise the work being done, not to mention the fact that I’m assuming a lot of people who are exposed to hateful discourse would prefer to just move on with their lives and focus on positive things rather than dwelling on the bullshit and having extensive conversations with internet strangers about hateful garbage on social media.
So, as isolating and maddening as it can be, I just wanted you to know that you aren’t alone and there are individuals and groups who are actively working to snuff out anti-Semitism online. (And if you feel enraged by what gets permitted to be posted online—rightfully so—remember that there’s a good chance that someone like myself has likely been monitoring that particular account that you’ve encountered and it’s likely that person has been consistently outraged at the continued inaction and the “we have investigated your reports and found that there was no violation of our rules” messages from moderators/admins while trying to push moderators into taking action to protect the community from hate.)
Yeah, shit on Reddit is bad. The prevalence of antisemitism on there goes in waves from what I have seen, always ebbing and flowing but becoming significantly worse during the existence of prominent hate subs. Probably the absolute worst time was around the both before and during the era of the Charlottesville fascist riots and their terrorizing of the Jewish community there and when The_Donald was at its peak. Those were when I really had to fully disengage for my own mental health because it was just so intensely unsafe being on that site.
And absolutely, I value much of the activists and the work they do so much. In the past year alone and as I’ve gotten more involved in the fediverse (and for the first time ever online feel comfortable to actually assume good faith in people and in discussions, which is crazy to me) I have been to able to realize I am a lot less alone than I have previously thought which I am exceptionally grateful for. But, being in the moment of dealing with the barrage of hatred weighs on you heavily. It goes without saying, the stress of being pretty much any kind of minority quite literally eats away at you, both mentally and physically. It’s just hard to describe the feeling of how incredibly isolating it is when stereotypes and hateful statements are given legitimacy on social platforms positioned for “civil” discussion. My right to exist as a human being a topic of debate for people and actively bearing witness to the Overton window shift is incredibly distressing and tiring. And then having the fact you feel distressed by it be completely invalidated by others saying you’re an alarmist or overreacting just adds salt to that wound. There comes a point where you genuinely just can’t deal with it anymore, you just don’t have the energy to be hyper-vigilant in digital social spaces and for your own personal safety you have no choice but to assume the absolute worst of everyone you are interacting with if you decide to stay as a spectator.
I would like to add that you used the magic word here. If you do a comment with the single word disengage on hexbear the person talking with you is supposed to disengage and not further comment at that chain of comments. This can be helpful. Feel free to report (doesn’t have to be extensive text) when people disregard that (which is punished swift and decisively in my opinion) or if you don’t feel welcome.
That said there might be some topics in which some users express opinions I wouldn’t like to read and they don’t like some I write. Still the site’s user base is held to be against antisemitism, though what they means varies a ton.
Your instance and lit cafe are two lemmy’s I like quite a bit and was really fond to have encountered them. Thanks for creating and keeping up some cultural spaces!
When I was engaged in my online activism on Reddit, which included the circa-Charlottesville period, shit seemed to be much worse. They’ve definitely cleaned up a lot of the worst subs although I have no doubt that the prevalence of anti-Semitism on Reddit persists despite that fact.
Yeah, I feel you.
While I wouldn’t be at the very top of their “To Exterminate” list, I would be pretty high up there due to a few personal factors and if it’s really distressing for me personally knowing that there are people openly pushing for the extermination of Jews (on the basic level of humanity as well as on the level of knowing that, essentially, I’m next) then I can’t imagine what it’s like to be the direct target of this rhetoric.
Yeah, that’s that secondary, passive sort of racism where people will just ignore/deny the dogwhistles and “give the benefit of the doubt” to the user who has ⚡⚡ in their username and is commenting using (((echo brackets))), which can add to the distress so much because of how isolating and crazy-making it feels.
I can’t say I blame you for having to disconnect from this stuff.
I know people who were directly impacted by the Charlottesville riot as well as people who were actually there who had to bear witness to watching Heather Heyer getting murdered. It was a trauma that had a direct ripple affect across the entire American Jewish community, especially since that area is such a big hub of Jews in that area of Virginia. It was so impactful to a lot of American Jews not only because many Jews actually had some degree of connection to someone who experienced what happened there, but it was also an inflection point for many gen z Jews who hadn’t really bore witness to such an intense public celebration of our peoples hatred before. Like yeah, we knew that people hate us but when Charlottesville happened and then hearing the president afterwards say “good people on both sides” was just an indescribable feeling. It was a moment of realization of “They don’t just hate us. They want us dead, and our own president just defended them in spite of that being made clear. What the fuck? Am I actually safe here?” And after when Pittsburgh happened, it just echoed that feeling even more.
It was so impactful that for a lot of right wing leaning young (Ashkenazi, primarily) American Jews it was made crystal clear for the first time to them that the American rights support of Jews is not just conditional, but their perceived whiteness is conditional as well. Their acceptance as “white Americans” can be revoked extremely easily. That fact made a pretty high amount of Jewish gen z-ers fully reflect on that and swing dramatically to the left politically.
Knowing all that and having talked with the people who were ran out of their synagogues back door with their torah scroll clutched in hand for their own safety and having to go into someones house to literally hide from nazis threatening them and then later witnessing the shit people were saying online about it was just too much to deal with. What has rattled me the most even after all these years that is almost never discussed online or really highlighted at all is that we are extraordinarily lucky more people didn’t die. All it would have taken was one slightly different decision on someones behalf for that entire situation to have turned into a genuine massacre. It’s really hard to emphasize just how close that incident was to turning into a mass causality event, and the quick thinking and actions taken to diffuse and protect their community by community leaders in that synagogue likely saved so many lives both in that synagogues community and outside of it as well.
Knowing that fact and having to witness the conversation unfold online was honestly sheer hell to deal with mentally tbh, I quite frankly felt like I was losing my mind at times watching people talk about it. Which granted is probably the point, make you question and second guess yourself to invoke that sense of terror