Amazingly ironic given that hexbear did do democracy for their federation decision:

www.hexbear.net/post/277508

“Hello Users of Hexbear I wanted to have a featured post discussing the next steps for federation. We have discussed this at length among the mod team, and it is pretty much evenly split between federating based on a “block-list” or federating based on an “allow-list”. While the mod team slightly skewed in favor of federating using a block-list, meaning that any instance not specifically blocked will be able to link with hexbear.net, we will be starting with an allow-list.

What this means is that only instances specifically on our allow-list will be able to link with us, there are a few reasons for this. We wanted to slowly integrate into the fediverse to see what it would mean for hexbear.net’s culture as well as how we fit into the wider fediverse. We also wanted to minimize the instances have not blocked threads, or does not block the reactionary/fash/pedo instances.

I was honestly suprised to discover that most lemmy instances block lemmygrad.ml but do not block the reactionary/pedo instances, sad.

Here is a tenative list of what our allow-list would look like: lemmy.world/instances , possumpat.io/instances , lemmy.ml/instances , sopuli.xyz/instances , discuss.tchncs.de/instances , lemmygrad.ml/instances , mander.xyz/instances , lemm.ee/instances , toots.matapocos.dog

a block-list would be massive and exhaustive to ensure that we do not federate with any pornographic, reactionary, fascist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, or csam-adjacent instances.

We will be creating a pinned post in c/hexbear where additional instances can be nominated for addition to the allow-list. www.hexbear.net/post/277506

Please see these previous posts by Nagarjuna regarding federation: www.hexbear.net/post/273407 and www.hexbear.net/post/273404

If you would like to officially put down your opinion on federation, please make a comment with 🧱 if you’d like to federate based on a block-list, a ✅ if you’d like to federate based on an allow-list, or a 🚫 if you do not with to federate at all. Thank you and as usual off-topic comments will be removed.

Thank you for the feedback the final count is 58 🧱 111 ✅ 45 🚫, please correct me if that is wrong”