During the weekend, I received the following message from a now deleted post originally titled ‘Why does such a large portion of Lemm.ee want to block Hexbear? And, how can Hexbearians improve?’:

Can you please share with the class how to find out what instances are defederated from hexbear? Some of us are still figuring out Lemmy. Thank you in advance!

First of all, if any of you are also wondering the same, you can check here with the defed.xyz website. Second of all, that question made me wonder why so many users here keep asking about defederation and I think the answer lies with this telling part of a comment made by @sunaurus about the possible defederation from Hexbear:

We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities.

Obviously there is nothing wrong with having limited manpower, resources etc. However, I personally believe that because of the sudden growth of this community, many (especially new) users are simply not aware of the fact that they will be left mostly to themselves and instead expect such a big instance to be better regulated/moderated. I know I was at first for those reasons.

Case in point, in the same post where I received the question, I was also attacked multiple times. And many other times (both in the weekend and in the past) I’ve been privately contacted to be harassed. What was particularly sad this time was that the mods here, instead of deleting the abusive comments which I reported several times, decided instead to remove the whole post altogether while those comments themselves were never touched. So, not only the reporting option became pointless, but it also removed (in my opinion) a nice conversation on the topic. In the mod log they wrote ‘reason: Troll bait’ for why the post was removed, but I find…let’s say very coincidental that every time a discussion about Hexbear (which might start very calmly at first) has then to be locked or deleted because of the trolling.

Now I would like to directly address a point made by @sunaurus, because while it’s true that we can

downvote and/or report as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities

that method is completely pointless if reports are not being acted upon. Additionally, while it’s true that one user can block specific users, that is also pointless if you are being dogpiled on since for every user you block, you are going to have a new one who you didn’t know and can now attack you. That seems like a very naive approach in my personal opinion. Also, because while the Hexbear admins might be great people trying to properly moderate their own instance and to look out for other users, the individual users might not share their views. And to illustrate this point, after @sunaurus shared his optimism here about Hexbear that

They [Hexbear admins] have implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119

the top comment in the post where the admins explain the new rules is literally

Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.

So I most certainly don’t share @sunaurus optimism that the mods will be able to contain all those users who behave badly, especially if they go on other smaller instances like ours, where they have no power. Thus, users in this instance are really left to fend for themselves.

Before concluding, I would like to quote part of a comment that @sunaurus made in that now-deleted weekend post:

over the past few weeks, I have received several DMs from users directly attacking me for not defederating Hexbear. This instance is provided through volunteer effort, I am not planning to respond to feedback in the form of demands or attacks, so I am not responding to these DMs directly, but I will write a generic response here: 1. Lemmy allows you to block users and communities 2. Lemmy will soon also allow you to block instances 3. You always have the option to switch to another instance with a different approach to federation, or start your own

I want to make absolutely clear that those people who sent him DMs to personally attack him are to be condemned. It is not acceptable to bully others, and we must remember the human behind each account. Also, both him and the admins are doing this whole thing out of pure interest. They are not paid to do so, nor they have to so. So I thank them for that, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who is appreciative of all their efforts in trying to give us all a nice community to be in.

If you, however, have also been attacked by some Hexbear users and/or were frustrated by the (lack of) admins support here, you now have a fuller picture of the situation. You also have an actual tool to help you to decide where to leave to if this is how things are, and you feel like they don’t work for you here. The beauty of so many different instances on Lemmy is that there are many different options to suit your own need. But I also think it’s important to manage expectations and to be clear upfront about what to expect upon joining Lemm.ee (at least at the moment).

I would be curious to know if users who have been in this instance for longer also had similar experiences. If not, I’d still be curious to know your thoughts because it has been made clear that defederating is not an option which is being considered, but some people here keep raising the question. I wrote this to share my thoughts, but also to update new users/give them a way to walk away if they so wished. Trying to forcibly push for a change in this instance’s direction when the admins have made clear they are not interested is pointless. And attacking admins is wrong