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.
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.