It looks like they have some kind of whitelist set up, limiting federation to the big instances, which seems like a strange thing for one of the small instances to do.

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[–] splinter@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Hey, I just randomly stumbled on this and thought I'd give you a reply, for what it's worth. We've got a whitelist because there are thousands of Fediverse instances out there and many of them host questionable content (things like loli porn). It's too much risk to ignore them, and too much effort to weed them out.

We've added everyone listed on join-lemmy.org who hasn't de-federated us. I guess if you're not on there then we just haven't noticed you yet. I've added your instance to our whitelist now.

If anyone else also wants to be added and isn't yet, please do reach out.

As you can tell by the comments in this thread, many people feel like they know us well based on what they have heard. I guess we are guilty of having a handful of members who used to be on the old exploding-heads instance, so we must be EH 2.0. All anyone would have to do is open our site and browse through the endless pages of shitposts for themselves to figure out how silly that is.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

All sounds reasonable. I think I just had an instant eye-roll reaction to the crack about “shitty admins” as the reason for your unusual configuration and making me do extra work to talk with you, and decided not to bother. But sure, if you want to talk with me I’ve got nothing against it.

[–] splinter@hilariouschaos.com 1 points 3 days ago

I think that was an old rant from before we were even federated, as to why I didn't want to bother at the time. It was an exaggeration, overall we've been getting along great with everyone else we've federated with since then.

I wasn't completely off base, for example a bunch of instances defederated us simply because we're "EH 2.0", even though they never interacted with us. At the time we were already defederated by a couple of the more zealous ones. The fine gentleman who runs Fediseer is recommending to everyone that they defederate us for being "chuds". It's all pretty childish.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I think you just answered your own question. If ponder.cat isn't on their white list, content won't federate.

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yes. The question I'm asking is, why?

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 31 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

That's a question for the admins there, but HC is the spiritual successor of, and ran by the same team as, ExplodingHeads. EH was frequently defederated for homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, racism, conspiracy, brigading, hate speech, and general toxicity.

I'm not sure if they've cleaned up their act since rebranding, but maybe they figured they'd start out with just the big instances since they were frequently de-federated before?

Context:

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Preemptive defederation, along the same lines as, "You can't fire me, I quit!"?

I'm just trying to wrap my head around it. I'm was asking because another of their communities is coming up for posting in my community tool. Thanks for the link.

We’re not federated because it’s just too much drama and not enough reward. There are too many instances, many of them inactive, lots of people uploading sketchy shit which federates across, it’s impossible to keep tabs on everything and lots of resources go into hosting that bloat which nobody here would care about. Fediverse politics are also cancer and every shitty admin thinks they’re important somehow.

I’m not opposed to federating selectively, with your instance for example. I mostly care about knowing that you actively admin it and I don’t have to worry about dodgy content making its way across here - if that’s the case and you’re keen, let me know.

My God.

Since they've decided I'm a shitty admin, I've instructed the community posting tool to skip over their stuff, and I consider the matter closed. I wish them luck.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 20 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

It's nice when the uh, um, jerks? self-segregate. Saves so much time having to filter them out.

(Also it was kinda obvious they were twats when their admin team was spamming new community communities with endless stupid groups.)

[–] nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

their admin team was spamming new community communities with endless stupid groups.

You did not find that chaos hilarious?

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 7 points 2 weeks ago

The first one or two, maybe. The next 50, eh not quite as much.

I suppose I'm just a boomer who doesn't get the kids anymore?

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 5 points 2 weeks ago

Any man who must say, "I am hilarious," is no true hilarious.

[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 1 week ago

I didn't mind their crazy half-baked idea communities, but they never committed to the bit. Plus with their whole federation issue, when people did comment there to try to make something happen, there was no response.....

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 8 points 1 week ago

My theory is that they're doing it to try and avoid defederation and bide their time until they can figure out a way to circumvent it, like was done with Mastodon defederation with activitypub-troll. Thankfully many instances haven't fallen for it and have defederated them anyway despite not being whitelisted by them.

[–] DrDystopia@lemy.lol 4 points 2 weeks ago

ran by the same team as ExplodingHeads.

EH was one guy who fucked off to NOSTR because he held free speech higher than the opinion of Lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and the likes who dominated the Lemmyverse in the beginning. I'm pretty sure it's someone else.

[–] Kierunkowy74@piefed.social 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You will probably have to ask hilariouschaos admins themselves (well, on an alt)

[–] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 4 points 2 weeks ago

That's what I'm doing, although anyone else who happens to know what's going on is free to answer as well. I don't feel like making an alt just to dodge around whatever they're doing.

[–] h3mlocke@lemm.ee 9 points 1 week ago

Dang, that too bad because none of their shit was hilarious...