Comment on Artifical Intelligence

• propter_hog@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I have decided that must be the case; it usually happens to me when I venture out of hexbear, haha.

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• OpenStars@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Lemmy.World is the largest instance, and they preemptively defederated from hexbear.net a year ago, citing several examples of user comments that they wanted to protect their own userbase from.

  Many other large instances have done similarly - another one is programming.dev (statement), although in their case if was merely to prevent one-sided conversations after hexbear.net defederated from them. The funny part of that story is how the admins took a vote, which indicated an unwillingnesd to defederate (27 to 19) but then did it anyway:-).

  Anyway, many users of hexbear.net have made quite the reputation for themselves around the Fediverse, to the point where MANY instances felt the need to defederate from the entire instance (think: Truth Social but claiming to be leftist). And at this point, many users on it seem proud of that or at least consider it part of the cost of traversing the wider Fediverse using an account based on hexbear.net.

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  • Nakoichi@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    (think: Truth Social but claiming to be leftist).

    This is disingenuous a hell and just some horseshoe theory bullshit where you insinuate we are the same as fascists because you feel uncomfortable with any criticism of liberalism from anyone to your left.

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    • OpenStars@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It is a fact that it is my opinion that hexbear users are (a) overly aggressive, (b) spout meaningless nonsense more often than not, and therefore (c) a waste of my time. However, you are just as equally free to hold your own opinion. Have a great day!

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  • abfarid@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Yeah, I know they have been defederated to pieces, albeit not in as much detail as you provided, I was just trying to confirm that that was the reason, to better understand how federation works. Our instance has lately been blocking some of their communities, too.

    I don’t quite understand the vote results, especially in conjunction with the post content, I don’t see any ties, but I was most surprised by the fact that they voted to defederate from blahaj.zone? Isn’t hexbear rabidly pro-inclusion, in particular regarding trans people?

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    • OpenStars@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      A summary of what happened between Blahaj.Zone and Hexbear.Net

      Ada, an instance admin of Blahaj.Zone is extremely welcoming and inclusive - I have always actively looked forward to reading anything they say wherever/whenever I encounter such across the Fediverse, and have never been disappointed so far. They, like the instance overall, are the real deal(s).

      Unfortunately, hexbear.net merely pretends to be thus, but like everything else they do it is a farce while their real goal is to be argumentative. They are actually quite open about this if you read past the initial prepared statements (or even read the official sidebar of the_dunk_tank) - on the instance they call it “dunking on” people, or “struggle sessions”, and no matter how many users, mods, and even admins/devs they turn away as a result (as that vote post mentions), they cannot seem to help themselves, even outside of their echo chambers where that is allowed & actively encouraged. Even/especially when their own admins beg & plead - and yes, also explicitly command - their userbase to FUCKING STOP… they will not. And so far I haven’t even mentioned the brigading… no matter how deeply I delve into this, there is always more.

      Defederation is - and should be - always a last resort. That said, it is necessary sometimes, b/c as it has been said the only thing that can never be tolerated is intolerance - e.g. if cancer cells refuse to inhibit their own growth, then it must be cut out for the sake of the rest of the body to live. Also, as you see, it was actually hexbear.net that initiated the defederation from most of those places not the other way around - Lemmy.World did not wait to be offered the chance to be on the receiving end, but for programming.dev, Blahaj.Zone, and Lemm.ee (which was kicked off but later refederated, read also from hexbear) it was hexbear.net’s choice, and the reverse defederation was only in friendliness to avoid dangling one-sided conversations where users on their platforms could talk to those on hexbear but the latter would not even know that there was a message awaiting their receipt, and subsequent response - as you are asking about here but in reverse.

      Startrek.website and mander.xyz tend to have their own focus and not attract all of this drama, hence why someone from hexbear.net can see the post and also comment on it, but users on e.g. lemmy.world, programming.dev, or lemmy.blahaj.zone would not see that comment. The hexbear user is thus shouting into the void, with respect to those instances, though not to ours who can see both.

      The sad fact (imho) is that new visitors to the Fediverse will never have any of this explained to them - instead, they have to do something like personally make the mistake of replying to a post in ChapoTrapHouse, found by sorting your feed by All rather than Subscribed, and then after WEEKS and WEEKS and WEEKS of batshit insane responses that do not end despite zero response back from said user, they finally will know what to expect from hexbear.net: overall (as a pattern) they enjoy argumentation, do not constrain themselves to that process being logical or the statements to be factual, but they sure do enjoy the “dunking on” process, so long as it is delivered from them to others, though obviously not in return. And from the other side, users of hexbear.net will notice how very few people “react” to their posts made in communities that can see outside of their instance - essentially for them the Fediverse contains fewer users, from their perspective. And then from our side, we see the drama between their sides, more so than even they do themselves.

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      • abfarid@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        When I first joined the Fediverse, back when Reddit 3rd party apps got nuked, I joined lemmy.world. While I didn’t see Hexbear post, comments, etc., but I did see plenty of comments of people mentioning them and warning about them. So by the time I switched to startrek.website (don’t remember why I decided to leave l.w, must have been due to some defederations) and finally encountered the mythical beast, I was already thoroughly prepared for it. So I would say, in general, newbies shouldn’t be entirely shocked to encounter a tankie, as they are mentioned a lot.

        And tbh, I prefer to stay federated with Hexbear, because among all the mindless circlejerk propaganda they will sometimes point out a fair criticism about the western culture/politics that I haven’t considered. In addition, as a half Ukrainian who was living in Kyiv at the time of invasion, I prefer to know what kind of ideas and misinformation is being circulated on the other side.
        Hexbear wouldn’t even be that bad if they just stopped pretending that only western empires are evil, and stopped bootlicking the leaders of the pseudo-communist countries. A LOT more people would agree with them if they were only anti-western, instead of also being pro-dictators. But then they wouldn’t be tankies, I suppose.

        Btw, Hexbear reminds me a lot of r/GamingCircleJerk. They also have a semi-noble cause, but express it in such a way that rubs EVERYONE the wrong way, not just the “Capital-G Gamers” who they are rightfully mocking. Because of that, r/GCJ has caused several site-wide dramas and inconvenienced people. They both also operate in this constant state of maximum sarcasm, so you can never tell if they are saying is a hyperbole or they are being serious but insane.

        Regarding Blahaj.zone, I haven’t interacted much with them, but I one day discovered that I’m banned from their c/196 because “Transphobe”. It wasn’t even due to an interaction with that community directly. In a completely different instance, I think it was lemmy.world, I commented with a question about why a user’s comment was called being transphobic. I then got mocked and eventually banned. So Idk if it was mod of that specific community or whole instance. I seem to be able to interact with Blahaj post from other communities though.

        And thank you for these massive posts. You seem to be a proper Lemmy historian, might need to remember your username for future potential inquiries.

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    • Lenins_Cat_Reincarnated@hexbear.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Hexbear has very tight moderation to make sure it’s a comfortable place for minorities and people who don’t like interacting with racism, misogyny, transphobia etc. I browse blahaj.zone occasionally and its moderation is just not good. The trans communities attract chasers which makes me not want to post there, and in 196 I regularly come across posts that are misogynistic or transphobic and have been up for days. I always report them and they often (not always) get deleted after like a day, which in my opinion is too late because the harm has been done (a 2 day old post should have been removed whenever a mod came across it).

      On hexbear I’ve not seen posts that were so blatantly misogynistic or transphobic, and posts get removed much faster. This is why many trans people in our community don’t want to federate with blahaj.

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      • abfarid@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Idk if you see @OpenStars’ comment, but he provided a link to the summary from blahaj.zone’s perspective. It does mention an incident with c/196, but it’s not the whole picture.

        In short, users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) were complaining about Hexbear users’ obnoxious behavior, “Hexbear users calling people “libs” as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin.”
        Users started asking to defederate from Hexbear and admin of Blahaj.Zone opened a thread to talk about it, which Hexbear users attacked and spammed the thread with images. Then, Hexbear user complained about c/196, that their comments were being removed, “comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs”. At which point, Hexbear preemptively defederated from Blahaj, mostly citing the incident above.

        I linked the whole thing, so you can see the details for yourself. But at the end of the day, I would say that the incident started with Hexbear users being Hexbear users.

        But also, what are “chasers”?

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    • OpenStars@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      @Blaze@reddthat.com Do you know why people on startrek.website cannot see certain communities on e.g. hexbear.net?

      I did not think it was even possible to block specific communities from an instance. I thought what Farid might be referring to is a change where some communities are allowed to be set to “local-only”, so that only those with an account specifically from that instance can make posts there. Then again, hexbear.net/c/chapotraphouse says that its Visibility is set to “Public” (even though I thought they said that they looked forward to changing it - did that never happen?).

      Various methods of linking that I’ve tried - explained in this guide post (btw @abfarid@startrek.website that is a neat community to subscribe to!:-) - such as startrek.website/c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net does not work for me, and the bang syntax never auto-completes it? Even this kind of searching startrek.website/search?q=!chapotraphouse&type=Co… for the community name does not work either (despite ChapoTrapHouse specifically saying that it should in its sidebar), nor clicking Communities, select All rather than Local, and type e.g. “chapo”. So it is not merely that nobody has subscribed yet - this instance seems somehow to really not be aware of that community?

      Perhaps this is a (new?) style of “partial defederation”, where not the users but the communities on an instance are excluded. But that cannot be right either, b/c e.g. startrek.website/c/Technology@hexbear.net works (it has no visible posts, though that is normal behavior whenever nobody has ever subscribed to it before from a particular instance, in this case star trek, but if one of us subscribed then roughly a day later the posts should be there - for comparison, startrek.website/c/Technology@lemmy.world also works and shows the posts). Though neither startrek.website/c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net nor startrek.website/c/the_dunk_tank@hexbear.net work. So some communities on hexbear.net seem to be selectively excluded from federation on startrek.website.

      To be clear I am not complaining - this is actually a helpful protection against users going into those unawares, as in: if they refuse to mark their communities as local then they should not be surprised when others make that choice for them - though I am curious.:-)

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      • abfarid@startrek.website ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        The communities you specified have been blocked on our instance. That’s what I was talking about, they are listed in the [modlog as “Removed”]:(startrek.website/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModRemo…)

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