No for defederation. You proceed to go on another instance (in a community that was for lemmygrad users only according to the sidebar), told them how they should do things, got banned, and now come to complain here. As other lemmygrad users rightfully pointed out, their site does not have the same history or culture as ours with regards to downvotes. As they also rightfully said, how would you react if lemmygrad users came here and told us to reinstate downvotes? It's fine to have a difference of opinion on matters as trivial as downvotes existing, it's a different instance. It's not hexbear 2.0. It will have different policies. They agree with us on 99% of things anyway, I'm pretty sure disagreeing about downvotes should not be a reason for defederation.

lemmygrad_court

This is a community for Lemmygrad users and admins to discuss administrative issues in a more transparent manner

A few things about this.

On the one hand:

1. I agree with you on removing downvotes being a good change, especially for minorities, and I think the argument that "downvotes help hide transphobic rhetoric" is a "free marketplace of ideas"-adjacent argument that ironically relies on the majority to support the minority.

2. I agree that the admin telling you "Actually, removing downvotes does not make it a better experience for trans people" does fall into "debatebroing a trans person's lived experience" territory and is definitely worth criticizing.

On the other hand I read through the thread and think I need to point out some things:

1. You opened up with "we should do what hexbear does" and when someone disagreed, you immediately went to "So you think hexbear is platforming reactionary content?", which is needlessly hostile and turns the whole thing into a lemmygrad vs hexbear debate when it really shouldn't be.

2. I disagree with calling this "civility fetishism". Civility fetishism is when people tell you to be calm while you're talking about hospitals being bombed in Gaza or when they tell you to be polite towards nazis, I don't think it's inappropriate to remain civil when talking about whether you should be able to downvote posts on lemmygrad dot ml. Civility is not inherently a bad thing, we only mock it when people tell us to be civil while arguing with people who actively want us dead.

3. I think some people in that thread are right that you are too quick to assume bad faith from a group of people who, and I can't stress this enough, aren't your enemies. Lemmygrad and hexbear agree on 99% of issues and personally, I have seen very few shitty takes from them. I think this admin was being kind of a douche and a debatebro, but they're still an admin on an explicitly marxist-leninist site that is overwhelmingly more good than bad.

I think you had an incredibly uncomfortable and frustrating experience because you got dogpiled on and downvoted on lemmygrad and consequently talked yourself into a rage, which I can sympathize with, it's a terrible experience, I've been there. As you yourself said, you're probably not in the best mental state to argue about this right now. I would urge you to cool your head and try to review the discussion in good faith. Assume that other MLs aren't your enemies and they might just be wrong on this issue for normal reasons, not because they're actually a reactionary who wants to suppress minorities. Remember that a lot of people on hexbear also opposed the removal of downvotes before it happened.

I read the points, seems clear that Lemmygrad does have less focus on being a purely safe space as Hexbear. But their users, when here, seem to always be on the level in my experience.

So I understand disliking the place, but I don't understanding how defederating helps address those concerns.

I personally don't agree, if only for the fact that grad has turned out to be the only actually left-wing instance besides our own.

Also, as others have mentioned, the people from the grad who have started hanging out with us here are cool, the ones who may not like our site culture don't come over here to start shit. If that starts happening at some point I'm absolutely open to changing my mind of course.

Sort by local and all you'll see from the grad are the friendly folk.

While I think your criticisms were basically correct and the ban was bullshit, I don't think this rises to the level of defederation for me. The systems and culture we've developed here are a unique combination of circumstance and deliberate policy. I myself argued against downvote removal all those years ago. A lot of people did. If it had just been put to a popular vote, I doubt it would have ever passed.

Looking back now, history has fully vindicated the mods. Getting rid of downvotes not only had the intended effect of helping to create a safe space for marginalized comrades, but has had so many beneficial, consequential secondary order effects that it's difficult, ironically, to imagine the site with downvotes at all.

So while I think your arguments to the 'Gradders were correct, I can't really blame them for not being able to take your criticisms on board because we ourselves found a path forward by fumbling forward together. They are Lemmygrad, not Hexbear, and they deserve our pity for that

If we're gonna defed from Lemmygrad, just turn the whole damn thing off and throw the federation experiment in the trash.

Sino Soviet Split at home

I feel like this isn't enough to warrant a defederation? Like, yeah I get that debating reactionaries and the like isn't something a decent chunk of people want to do, but that would be confined to Lemmygrad spaces. It's still not an issue in Hexbear proper. And there's been lots of great people interacting here from Lemmygrad. I don't think we should defederate.

I think most of what you say is at minimum valid points of concern and critique for lemmygrad, but none of it rises to the level of defederation making sense.

If you want to change a community, especially one that you only have limited involvement in, it's very important to be patient and to understand where the people more involved in the community are coming from (no investigation etc).

If you aren't up to that because it involves suffering through a certain level of bullshit (and it does), that's totally fine, but it's more a reason for you to stay off of grad than for us to defederate.

Dune fox boy has an attitude problem and I think that's concerning, but even as we seek for him to fix it, we need to understand that he has been one of the main admins of grad for a long time and been dealing with liberal bullshit from federated communities for a long time and his excessive defensiveness (and it is excessive) does not merely come from a fundamental evil in his soul nor does it mean we should flatly condemn him instead of work with him to improve.

We are all humans here, and I think that the people on lemmygrad (even Dune boy) have demonstrated that they want for things to be better than they are, so it is worth suffering their weak points just as they suffer ours so we can both try to help each other improve. Not everyone in each group will necessarily be up to that, but they can just stay in their own circles because each group respecting the other's rules is a reasonable baseline expectation that is already enforced.

Edit: banning you was incorrect and Dune boy should apologize for that one, imo. Banning someone to get them to disengage when the interactions are negative is valid, but that doesn't seem to be the given reason nor would it have been timed very well if it was. You were treated with a lack of respect and benefit of the doubt that you should have been given as a relative pillar of a sister community and that's not okay.

I went and read the thread that no doubt spawned this one and a few things.

First everything you said on grad is correct.

Second they can't come here and do that shit because they will be banned, admin or not.

Third I'm not sure I understand how defederation solves anything. Historically we have defederated because their users were coming into Hexbear and harassing our users or posting shit content to a degree that the our modmins couldn't or shouldn't deal with. Is that happening with grad? If it is, okay then yeah probably defed. I haven't seen it (on Hexbear at least... again you're spot on that the kind of debatelord "respect bad views" shit is happening on grad.) Maybe it is happening here too and our mods are just so powerful that none of us ever see the bad shit. But if they aren't coming here and stirring up shit...then just don't go to their comms? You can just go local only and that solves the immediate harm they're doing to you and other trans comrades in the site. Defederation doesn't remove them from the Internet they'll still be over there with their shit takes. You just won't see them unless you choose to go and engage them... which is exactly the same as just browsing local only or not subscribing to any grad comms.

If the root issue here is "Hexbear should not be federated with any instance that does not have a 1:1 ideological alignment with Hexbear" then that's a different discussion and one that's probably interesting to have but one that would necessarily result in Hexbear just completely defederating from everyone because there is no community on the fediverse that does a better job protecting minority comrades than Hexbear. Maybe that's a discussion worth having again.

I hope the sleep helps, comrade.

I don't think the issues you present here are worth defederation with an otherwise staunchly communist and anti-transphobic instance. I don't agree with their policy on comment voting and I would like them to commit to being proactive about removing transphobia, but allowing a dimbulb reactionary to babble on about stuff they don't understand isn't that serious, and in that first example you linked, I think you should practice recognizing when an online interaction is more emotionally draining than edifying, and disengaging when that's the case.

One thing I see repeatedly in that removing downvotes thread is justifying bad decisions as accommodations for burned out users. It's very silly, and somewhere between liberalism and skill issue.

I can't speak from the trans experience, so it's possible problems were there that were invisible to me, but I thought that Lemmygrad (or communism.lemmy.ml initially) had a fantastic community three or four years ago and I actually preferred it to chapo.chat. The effortposts and friendly community did a lot to bring me further left. The site became horribly toxic overnight the second genzedong got banned from reddit. I ended up giving up on it about a month afterwards and haven't logged in since.

Them, a bunch of soyjaks: Nooooooo, we need to keep downvotes, how do we show displeasure at lib posts noooooo

Me, a gigachad: We should get rid of upvotes as well and retvrn to phpBB forums.

But seriously, that admin is full of shit and always had sus vibes to me. Upvotes and downvotes only came about in Web 2.0 social media sites and even then, it's mostly a Reddit thing. Old-school forums didn't have any of that bullshit. It's very obvious that upvotes/downvotes are used to drive up engagement (people get mad that the wrong thing got upvoted/downvoted) as well as provide a quantifiable metric that the algo, which purposely feeds people angry slop that further drives engagement, can use. So their nonsense of "getting rid of downvotes is lib" is just that, nonsense. The real lib move is to keep the upvote/downvote paradigm that was set up by a shitty social media corporation. Mao's Combat Liberalism, if they are so inclined to consider a shitty Reddit clone as a form of combating liberalism, stipulates that we're supposed to actually explain shit to people, not press a shitty downvote button.

Their grips about the evil Hexbearian somehow imposing their site culture on their instance is also nonsense. First of all, they (and the vast majority of Lemmy instances) don't have a unique site culture. They're just Reddit clones with the same shitty Reddit-derived semblance of site culture. Oh no, their genzedong-derived culture will have to change. How will they possibly cope. Second of all, a prominent Hexbear user advocating for good changes to make their instance less shitty isn't imposition. Have Hexbear admins threaten the Lemmygrad admins to defederate Hexbear from Lemmygrad? Did Hexbears do a brigardino^TM^ and mass upvoted your comments? No, we have not. The OP of that thread is a Lemmygrad user, as demonstrated by the numerous posts on Hexbear using a Lemmygrad account, so they can't accuse us of creating alts and trying to change their instance from within. And finally, getting rid of downvotes isn't even exclusively a Hexbear thing since the chasers over at blahaj had done so as well.

If the things you described were being imposed on us by federating with lemmygrad, then I would agree. But as it stands it’s limited to their instance right? To me, federating with an instance is like having a visa-free/open border. We can travel between our instances easily but we have to follow the rules of the instance we are currently in. So federating with them doesn’t change hexbear, and my experience so far is that it works pretty well. And your bad experiences over there seem limited to when you go over there. I’m sorry for the trouble they’ve caused you though, that sounds disheartening.

Not disputing any points but the vast majority of users on lemmygrad in my experience are true comrades and are very useful in the other instances as backup, they make it harder to accuse hexbears of being a weird abberant view because you see organic agreement from other instances in a heated discussion. It would be a shame to lose all of them because of some debatelords. In my opinion.

If we shut out everybody that is associated with someone that has a bad take everyone will end up alone. We all have our blind spots and hexbear is expert at pointing out trans blindspots but there are probably blindspots that the Lemmygrad community sees better than hexbear.

I agree with most of what you said in the downvote discussion but (and you'll hate me for this) I do think you got hostile very quickly which brought out the worst in some Lemmygradites. Nobody was trying to be transphobic. Yes they should do a bit of work on how they relate to marginalized people but I think that is an issue for the individual users and not a reason to defederate from a bunch of comrades.

Wtf, they banned you for "incivility" for your comments in the thread about removing downvotes? I didn't see you make even a single a comment that could even possibly be construed as incivility, I only saw you making reasonable arguments about something you're passionate about it. If that's what they think Hexbearian incivility looks like, then I can't imagine how they'd react to being on the wrong side of the dog pilings and dunkings we give to proper reactionaries.

If nothing else, I think our admin team needs to make a point to sit down and have a talk with lemmygrad's to hash this out and push for them to unban you and apologize for being overly dismissive of your valid concerns. I don't think this yet rises to level of requiring defederation, Lemmygrad is without a doubt the most similar forum to Hexbear on the entire internet, and it'd be a massive shame to lose all of their cool users. But eliminating transphobia is extremely important to us, and if lemmygrad cares about the union of our two communities, then they should be willing to compromise every once in a while. That doesn't necessarily mean removing downvotes, but it does mean taking a more pro-active stance on rooting out transphobia even if they haven't personally been effected by it enough to notice.

Hard agree on the debatebro shit- I came here to get away from that, fuck civility.

I fully support defederation from instances which are harmful to and or antithetical to the welfare of trans comrades. If Lemmygrad admin is unwilling or unable to learn from what Hexbear has experienced and recounted, then that includes defederation from them.

I think your criticisms are valid. I also tend to just put all other instances in the same boat and feel like there are a lot of instances I'd rather see chopped before grad, but I understand having strong feelings about it considering they are supposed to actually be principled

As someone that owns a now failing web community from back in the days of fark and metafilter, I've been pleasantly surprised by how well removing downvotes has worked for Hexbear, but I think the reason it works is also because we have a strong admin/mod team that's not afraid to bring the hammer down reasonably quick and a user base that largely understands why that's necessary. I'm not sure it would work somewhere where people believe in that 'battling it out in the marketplace of ideas' bullshit, and honestly I'm not sure anything would work in that scenario. Downvotes at least give users the ability to try and repress fash bullshit from taking hold, but as long as we live in a world the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources are in the hands of people who have no accountability to truth, astroturfing and counter-revolutionary like agitation is always going to be something that requires a strong hand to snuff out. We see that out in the offline world with how China has to use the great firewall to handle NGOs and manufacturing consent; Enabling debate bro, 'both sides' bullshit is always going to be counter to safe spaces regardless of whether there's downvotes or not.

That's my long winded way of saying I agree with you, but I think it'll take more than removing downvotes, and it does seem like you've got valid concerns that make defederating something that needs to be considered .

Wait this is not a joke post?