Update: Although we officially still have a few days remaining on this vote, it seems clear that this proposal won't be voted in.
Thanks to everyone for their feedback and votes! I had expected a split vote on this one and it turned out around 1/3 for the proposal and 2/3 against, so that is a quite emphatic no! And of course, we will respect the vote.
I hope we can maybe revisit our instance blocking policies more generally after lemmy has properly working per-user instance blocks, as some folks commented as it will open up more options for personal choice. For example, we could keep a list of sanctioned instances (like csam site) as it works now, but maintain a separate list of "use with caution" instances (aka hesitations in fediseer) that are blocked by default in each user's personal blocklist. But now users could choose to enable those sites for themselves if they wanted to.
For me, that seems like the best overall solution for user choice, and for the new user experience. But it may not sound good to you folks, so that's why we have the voting system in place so we can get quality feedback and also hopefully generate ideas for improvements that will benefit the community.
On that note, anyone can contact me or any of the site admins if they have a proposal they want to appear here on the governance community, and we'll be happy to help you out.
Unruffled
Hi mateys. I'm gonna keep this short and sweet because I don't really have any skin in the game on this one. I am in fact quite happy to leave this decision up to the wider dbzer0 community. On that note, please do not comment on this post unless you are a dbzer0 user - we'd prefer not to have anyone else weighing in.
This post isn't to convince anyone to re-federate or otherwise. In fact, our admin team genuinely doesn't know for sure what our community sentiment is on the topic, or whether or not it's worth a try. My guess is that the community will be quite divided on the topic, as many users are on the topic of hexbear. But the only way to find out for sure is to ask you, so here we are.
But I will say that for me personally, although we still have the occasional drama, and despite past run-ins, I have slowly grown to appreciate having some hexbear users around to help balance out all the turbolibs. While I think its fair to say our instance and theirs will never see eye-to-eye on certain topics, we have coexisted with them in relative calm over the past 12 months. If we can achieve ~~harmony~~a ceasefire with hexbear, then maybe we could do the same with lemmygrad?
I'd also prefer our users to make their own choices with regard to instance blocking of leftist sites in particular.
Obviously there will be some folks here that will hate this idea, and some who think it is worth a try and/or would like to make their own choices with regards to blocking. All I will ask is that you go have a look at lemmygrad.ml before you vote, and ask yourself if there is anything posted there you think warrants keeping them defederated?
Because this might be a divisive topic, I'm setting the threshold for this proposal succeeding at >66.6% majority rather than the default >50% so that there is a clear mandate.
The proposal is as follows:
That dbzer0 removes lemmygrad.ml from our blocked instances list for a 1-month trial period. Another vote will then be conducted to either federate permanently or to reinstate the instance block.
Notes
- AFAIK none of our admins have discussed this with lemmygrad prior to this post, so we don't know how they will respond, even if this vote succeeds. But having just checked, we are not currently blocked from their end, so in theory re-federating will be a straightforward process (at least technically).
- We really don't want to cause a big rift in our instance over this, so please there is really no need to get into heated arguments (I mean, what are the chances? Lol). Your vote is what counts most and we will commit to be guided by the voting outcome.
- If this vote succeeds we will reach out to their admins to see if we can come to some mutual agreement about reintegrating our communities while hopefully keeping conflict to a minimum. Having said that, some conflict is probably inevitable ngl. But I think we will be able to ride it out ok.
- I've covered a lot of concerns and talked about conflict a lot, so I'll just add that the big positive of re-federating is that there will be a ton of new users and content to interact with, which will hopefully add to the Lemmy experience for our users if the proposal is voted in.
expiry: 7
I tried to make Hexbear work for a while. I ended up blocking them because they kept wasting my time, having to check any source, and statement I ever saw from them, with basically all then falling apart.
I thought maybe blocking some offending hexbear communities would be enough, but then kept seeing the same pattern on anything hexbear associated. In the end I burned out on it.
I suspect that most others will equally come to the conclusion of instance blocking, which I think makes the pivotal problem here. Can we allow federation with an instance that the vast majority of our userbase has blocked?
On an individual level I agree, that you can "just block lemmygrad/hexbear/ml/world/startrek" if you don't like them for any reason. But that basically leaves interaction with that instance to all the others. It's fine if a few do it, but if most do it, it resigns the platform to uncontested bullshitting from lemmygrads side.
At first that might then load the mods. They can't really block lemmygrad if they have to moderate their communities from them. But then what about the lies, misleading statements, that got me burned out. The stuff not obviously problematic, and not a rule violation either. If noone bothers checking and contesting that, or those few that do argue then get overwhelmed by lemmygrad votes and downvoted into oblivion on those enclave threads, then the uncensored state of your instance posts will be hell and we will simply be closing our eyes to it with the blocking.
At that point, other instances will come to know us as the ones with lemmygrad brigading in our posts, and the easy solution there is not to figure out how to get rid of the lemmygrad stuff bleeding thru their own defederation, but to simply instance block us.
In summary, I don't think personal instance blocking helps with the nazibar problem. We can only federate if enough people will not block lemmygrad.