Hello users of Hexbear while we are always accepting moderation applications I would like to begin another formal volunteer drive.

Those of you interested in volunteering as a moderator, can send me your responses to the application questions below using either hexbear direct message or matrix message.

The answers may be as short or as long as you feel is adequate.

Hello users of hexbear we are going to have some extended downtime on Wednesday 26/6/24 for approximately 8 hours. Beginning around 12:30 CST / 7:30 pm CET

If you have issues logging in remember to clear your cache and/or cookies.

Hello users of Hexbear with the upcoming version of lemmy 0.19.4 we will be able to change local communities’ federation to local only however it is experimental as they are developing private communities.

In a previous federation discussion, we stated that we would temporarily remove lemm.ee from our allow-list until hexbear communities and users have the means by which to set hexbear communities to not federate out, restricting it to hexbear users. Now that this tool is available, we will refederate with lemm.ee after we complete the update.

Please use this post to discuss federation in general, as well as provide feedback to the hexbear mod and admin team in regard to federation.

Hello users of Hexbear, we have wonderful news!

Due to the hard work of @makotech222@hexbear.net , @Ryaina@hexbear.net , @Sphere@hexbear.net , and the rest of our Development/Infrastructure team we have restored the chapo.chat Active sort!

You may now notice a fresher and more engaging feed, remember you can set default sort settings in your user settings including choosing Local, All, or Subscribed communities in addition to the post sort method.

We would also like to take this opportunity to begin another volunteer drive, if you are interested in volunteering as a moderator, please send in the application below via hexbear direct message or matrix message.

Hello users of hexbear we will be bringing the server down to update synapse and run some maintenance.

This will occur in the next couple of hours and the update itself should take less than 60 minutes, even considering the possible schema update however supplementary services could be offline for as much as 5 hours to be safe (assuming the worst case scenario where we have to restore and then wait for it to catch up)

Hey hexbears just want to update everyone.

We took the weekend to properly consider and are removing: programming.dev , aussie.zone , and lemm.ee from our allow-list.

We will look at refederation with lemm.ee after local-only communities are developed. When that feature is available we would really like to consider changing every hexbear community to local-only except for chapotraphouse, askchapo, news, and the_dunk_tank. The final say on if a community is local only or not is 100% up to the mod team on that community.

The reason for this is that lemm.ee despite having twice our monthly active users has a 700k annual comment rate to hexbear’s 1 million, in addition lemm.ee has very little active communities that do not exist on hexbear.

Resulting in lemm.ee benefit of federation being votes and views, with a secondary benefit of comments.

However, as expressed by users belonging to marginalized groups, comments from .ee users are often lib-shit and in some cases outright hostile. While many on hexbear love dunking on these lost libs the duty to protect marginalized users is much more important.

The end vote for programming.dev and aussie.zone was a tie, so we decided to break the tie in favor of defederation. The decision on lemm.ee was much harder as the average user did express desire to remain federated however the admin team decided that a temporary removal from our allow-list was the best option.

As an admin team we have never wanted to prioritize growth, and we wanted to give federation with liberal instances a try, however we consider providing a safer browsing experience for marginalized users more important than the opportunity to dunk.

While user side instance blocking and local sort are options, neither address the issue of federated instance users coming into posts in hexbear communities to make reactionary comments.

Thank you everyone who gave input and please provide any feedback, comments, concerns, etc in comments.

final vote count:

federation

all 32

aussie.zone 27

lemm.ee 41

programming.dev 27

lemmy.blahaj.zone 5

defederation

all 40

aussie.zone 19

lemm.ee 4

programming.dev 19

lemmy.blahaj.zone 43

Hello users of Hexbear, we wanted to do a federation check-in.

So far these are the instances in question but please use this post as a suggestion for other instances to either federate with or defederate from or to comment your thoughts on federation in general.

aussie.zone

lemm.ee

programming.dev

lemmy.blahaj.zone

kbin.social / fedia.io

Please comment to vote:

indicates you want to federate with all the instances listed above

indicates you want to defederate with all the instances listed above

indicates you would like to defederate with some and federate with others (please include what instances you want for each)

Here are some relevant posts/comments:

https://hexbear.net/comment/4515862

https://hexbear.net/comment/4510892

(Nath is an aussie.zone admin)

https://hexbear.net/post/1592684

https://hexbear.net/post/369410

(we would selectively not federate with their /c/196 community)

kbin.social and fedia.io are kbin and mbin respectively which is very similar but also distinct from lemmy. These are the two largest instances but we may look to add more in the future. There is an issue with those two as they deanonymize the modlog and allow users to inspect the upvotes for a post/comment. If users vote to federate with kbin/mbin instances and we experience moderator harassment they will be defederated from immediately.

My personal opinion follows:

I think that lemm.ee primary worth is the 1.7k daily active users.

programming.dev has active programming communities

aussie.zone has a lot of australia specific communities

lemmy.blahaj.zone has specific queer communities

kbin.social and fedia.io value is from userbase

https://the-federation.info/platform/184

https://the-federation.info/platform/290

https://the-federation.info/platform/73

hexbear is 1.75k users per month compared to .ee 3.6k and kbin.social 4.6k

Removed kbin and mbin due to moderation / user self-deletion federation problems

Hello users of Hexbear!

Some of you may have noticed some new communities created, and one … deleted.

I now come to you asking if anyone motivated enough would care to submit an application to become a moderator. You may do so through hexbear DM or through matrix DM (instructions at the end of the post)

We are specifically looking for new moderators in these communities (dunk tank, askchapo, memes, chat, politics, electoralism, doomer, covid, fashion, europe, travel, islam) but accepting applications for any community that you are interested in.

Also, if you would like to create a community please comment what the community is in this post or make a post in https://hexbear.net/c/commrequest

You may also use this post to comment any comments, questions, concerns, criticisms, or compliments related to hexbear, its moderation, or the community.

Thank you everyone for another year of great posting!!!