Hello users of Hexbear, there have been many changes and some drama the past few months.
The recent changes we've been making have been an attempt to create a more safe and welcoming environment for many demographics that have been overlooked in the past.
For any of our comrades that have been unintentionally hurt in this process, we apologise and hope to find a solution that accommodates as many people as possible while still meeting the needs of the marginalised groups who need a space like this the most.
The intent of this post is to provide a space for all users to air grievances with regard to the site. As well as provide suggestions for specific things that could be changed to address your grievance. Comments insulting the mod team or those without a specific means to address your problem may be removed. No commenter will be sitebanned, unless it clearly breaks the code of conduct.
Can you please show the comments where people made actionable death threats?
The only one that was brought to my attention was one against a streamer that was in no way actionable and in-line with jokes made at many public figures by hexbear users.
Saw this on lemmygrad while browsing all. Before this devolves into hearsay, I'm just going to state what happened. A user decided to create a bunch of alt accounts on different instances, send death threats on public comments and harras users for a difference of opinion, including me. This went on for days, which led to a community witch-hunt which was also very unproductive. I'll just link the start of it publicly here, because it was acknowledged by an admin at the time. So I don't understand the whole "we weren't aware of this", it happened in pretty much every thread on the issue. The user would spin up their alts and do the usual harrassment tour.
https://hexbear.net/comment/5614587
https://hexbear.net/modlog?userId=2181559
https://hexbear.net/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=2183486
Just search up all the users with "debatebro" in the username field in the modlog and you can see everything.
So this is some wrecker that spun up a bunch of random accounts to harass users and then got banned, not a user. It was handled as every single other wrecking attempt on the site, I'm confused as to why this is a problem
How do you know it's not a user on their alt account? They seemed different from ordinary wreckers, posting about users pronoun tag changes, their country of birth, etc. Suggesting that they spent some time on hexbear. The truth is that we don't know if it was a wrecker or a user on their alt accounts, and I no longer feel welcome posting here given that uncertainty, the fact that it could happen again.
Given the above, goodbye and have a nice day.
I feel you on the uncertainty, but I don't know what the admin solution here is or why any other instance is any safer (in principle that is. For you specifically, just avoiding the place where the harasser clearly originated makes sense). They can't unmask the user's IP or other technical clues, as they were registering via other instances. I suppose we could have turned off federation to that instance temporarily or demanded their admins deal with the repeated registration of such accounts. I don't know if that was done/discussed or not in the moment, maybe admins can chime in. It does feel like we could have tried to go beyond "just let them pop up and ban them as they come", but options are limited
Also wrecker vs. user as I see a lot of people using it here, is a false dichotomy. Sometimes, perhaps even often, the wrecking is coming from inside the house. Its not always possible to know for sure though
We did temporarily defederate until the admin of that instance was able to help us in resolving the problem.
Good to know! I think that yall did all that was reasonably possible, in that case. I mean long term maybe some tooling could be developed to suss out users who do these sorts of things, but there are limits to what one instance admin can do.
At bare minimum, the admins could apologize to the user for their lack of urgency in addressing the issue. It was obvious the wrecker was a Hexbear alt because they knew the user was South African and even knew they were a white South African, which is not something any rando would know. Once it got to the point where the wrecker started threatening to slit the throats of that user's family in their sleep, it was time to lock the thread and take immediate action, which the admins failed to do so. The admins didn't do shit outside of eventually defedding from the offending instance after I requested they do so.
I disagree that it's obvious the wrecker was a hexbear alt
How can you say that this isn't a wrecker that lurks the news mega, who saw this info and decided to target people that often posted in the news mega; aaaaadjsf and regon.
aaaaaadjsf mentioned those bits of info more than once, so I disagree that only a hexbear user would know that information.
i agree we could always react faster but that isn't a personal thing, we are people too and we try to have an overlap of admin level mod tools but sometimes life happens. Which is why we always need more community level mods to further extend our ability to deal with wreckers.
@aaaaaaadjsf@lemmygrad.ml I am sorry we did not act faster in dealing with the threats against you, I am genuinely sorry that this experience has made this space feel unsafe for you in addition to the anguish caused by that individual targeting.
Well, there's this entire thread for one: https://hexbear.net/comment/5782662
You have the same people: Regon, Waterbottle who claims to be an alt of Melina and got banned for being an alt of Melina, Red_Renewal_Cosmonaut who's very obviously an alt of HelltakerHomosexual, and that same Debatebro_X account. I have an extraordinary hard time believing that Debatebro_X is a genuine stranger to those three. Did Debatebro_X just coincidentally stumble upon another thread with Melina and HelltakerHomosexual feuding with Regon, and under alts no less. To me, if Debatebro_X isn't an alt of one of those three or another Hexbear account, Debatebro_X is a friend who knows and is communicating one of them through Discord, Steam, another lemmy instance, and so on.
What's even more troubling is Melina's massive accusation against Regon, even going so far as to accuse Regon of being behind those Debatebro_X accounts. That accusation still stands completely unaltered as of this comment and in a locked post no less, meaning some mod saw the accusation and thought it had enough merit to not be removed. Well, if that accusation has merit, then shouldn't Regon be permabanned for threatening another Hexbear user's family? And if the accusation is completely meritless, then why is it still up 18 days later?
That's the exact situation I described, wreckers lurk and watch for a struggle session and jump on it to sow divisiveness.
We cannot know for sure who is behind it so in pursuit of assuming good-faith of our fellow hexbear users I think that rather than two people who use(d) the site as a safe space wrecking it that it is instead a nazi weirdo who stalks the site trying to wedge segments of the userbases
Waterbottle was banned soon after that and the comment you referenced was missed, i have now removed it, thank you for reporting it. I cannot speak for the perosn who locked the post but often times stray comments are missed on a banned account. I'm sorry to @REgon@hexbear.net for missing that and having that accusation stay up for so long.
Given the fact that wreckers have individually targeted other users & mods using personal information gleaned from lurking posts/comments as well as the precedent of wreckers increasing activity during struggle sessions I feel much more confident in assuming it was an outside wrecker than a hexbear user.
Again this speaks to assuming good-faith with fellow hexbear users.
I'm sorry that you no longer feel welcome posting here, and am happy to see that lemmygrad is a good fit for you.
Goodbye and hope you have a nice day/night as well
How would you even determine who on hexbear it is?
Ultimately we can't because we randomize IPs, for me, it makes more sense that a wrecker who frequently targeted the news mega with wrecker alts from lemmy.club to pick up on info that was mentioned there and use that info to target two news-regulars during a struggle session. Then, taking advantage of internet sleuths guessing it was hexbear users to continue. Long-time users suddenly making alts to wreck the site they themselves use makes less sense.
I'm sorry that you no longer feel safe here. I do think that there are lessons to be learned from your experience and I'd like to think that we will do better with addressing such cases in the future. Take care of yourself comrade.
Thanks for coming forward with this, you just saved me a bunch of time. I was in the process of trying to track down what this was all about.
im assuming they were made in DMs. im not gonna dig into this and go looking for receipts, the fact that multiple people separately told me the same thing is proof enough for me. tbh it's been good for me to have a reason to get away from this site, the level of needing to touch grass in this community is unhealthy
Death to America
Being aware of one's enjoyment of the site is in the CoC so taking breaks or leaving is encouraged. Without a comment/post link, dm report or a username of who received the threat I can't look into it more, if anyone has more info you are welcome to comment or message me directly.
Maybe a few people claiming that's the case is good enough for you to believe, but without proper receipts it's not something we can address. You are making some serious accusations against the mod team and if you're not willing or able to provide receipts then why even bother bringing it up?
You assume that these were messages made in DMs, which tells me that you haven't seen these threats yourself and are just taking someone's word for it. I would advise against trusting random people online without any substantial evidence. For all you know, it could have been the same person with multiple accounts just trying to stir shit up.