I am not sure where to post this - most of us on this instance probably use it as a "general-purpose" one to launch ourselves into the wider Fediverse, with only a few communities being here locally. @jgrim@discuss.online @lazyguru@discuss.online
I would like for Discuss.Online to defederate from the troll instance hexbear.net, to protect new users (who don't understand how communities work, local and remote) from being exposed to their toxicity and therefore drive people away from the Fediverse. I personally made the mistake of responding to a comment in a post in !ChapoTrapHouse@hexbear.net and continued to receive messages from them - each one triggering my Notifications - for WEEKS afterwards (and then did the same for lemmygrad.ml as well, though iirc at least one and probably both of these occurrences likely was from my prior instance StarTrek.Website, which I moved from to here b/c of Discuss.Online's much better admin practices e.g. significantly higher uptime). I almost quit the Fediverse entirely after those incidents, though thankfully I recalled how Kbin used to be better, less toxic I mean, than Lemmy, and pushed through to figure out how to block things, especially instances (which sadly does absolutely nothing to stop this effect, when in communities not actually located on those instances, since the "instance block" is more of a "community mute"). Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here, almost like a rite of passage to learn which instances need to be avoided, and yet we don't even know how many users this is turning away from us.
Such instances and hexbear.net in particular either cannot or will not control their users, and in fact there is evidence that the admins themselves have lied to other instance admins, at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith (admittedly, the other possibility is that the admins lied to their own userbase - although is that really much better?). You can read all about this particular incident in e.g. https://discuss.online/post/13387124 (and others e.g. https://lemmygrad.ml/post/6205969), although it is only the latest in a long string of such occurrences. Another good read is https://discuss.online/post/434998, which cites several examples that caused the admins of Lemmy.World to defederate from hexbear.net (much of the content has since been deleted, either by mods or by the OP, but it should be visible somewhere e.g. the modlog?). Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated from this instance - e.g. https://sh.itjust.works/post/4279462 and https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 and https://feddit.org/post/41472 (I don't understand German so that's the best example I could find there).
Personally I want very badly to defederate from users on lemmy.ml for similar reasons, and also the admins there likewise are not transparent with their policies of saying one thing while doing another, in particular site-wide banning people for comments that they did not know were taboo, b/c it says so nowhere that people know how to read what topics are prohibited (e.g. in the sidebar it just says "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers", and there is a link to "What is Lemmy.ml", which is just a broken link). That one I understand may be more problematic to defederate from although I think there is a strong case to be made for it. Fwiw, it was recently discussed in https://discuss.online/post/13727946 including that incident where a mod told a user that they (the mod) wanted to kill them (the OP) (sadly, I am not anywhere close to joking or exaggerating - read it for yourself e.g. at https://hexbear.net/post/3706906/5518427 where even the unremoved comments from the mod doubles down with "nono I don't want to shoot for pointing that it's a game, I want to shoot you because...", and then later tripled down still further, e.g. stating “I hope you die soon.”). To be clear, the incident occurred on hexbear.net, but the mod is from lemmy.ml - those instances are often intertwined, along with lemmygrad.ml.
But regardless of what happens with lemmy.ml, the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?
Tangentially, @Blaze@feddit.org does great work in enticing mainstream Redditors to come to Lemmy, and is looking for an instance to recommend that new users to come to, though the current federation with hexbear.net is a dealbreaker. I don't know if you would even want to see a large influx of new more mainstream users from there, and to be clear I think that Discuss.Online should defederate from hexbear.net (and possibly lemmy.ml) either way, but I wanted to point out how defederation is not necessarily a bad thing i.e. in terms of decreasing available content, as doing so would open up new possibilities to be more welcoming to an audience that gets turned away by such toxicity and political extremism as is constantly flooding over here from those sources, i.e. increasing content overall.
Discuss.Online is such a welcoming instance, I feel, and you are doing a fantastic job of being admins, e.g. as evidenced by the uptime stats, and upgrade timeliness, etc. The only downside is being willing to host such toxic content on this instance that derives from other sources that are not nearly so welcoming and friendly - and yet are presented side-by-side here along with all other content as being equally worthy of attention (especially when browsing by All, which I note is the default behavior, rather than Subscribed). We can do nothing to control others, only ourselves, but deciding to remain federated with them is a choice that reflects poorly on us imho (even if most of us have already blocked or otherwise avoid those communities personally, being more tech-savvy than your average mainstream Redditor), so I hope you will give strong consideration to these points, regardless of whatever the outcome may end up being. And thank you in advance for that!:-)
You have added to this discussion imho:-).
You are correct I think that the true ideal would be to not prevent people who want access to those communities from being able to do so, i.e. the opt-in nature should not be blocked, nor should people (especially new users) be forced into being presented that content devoid of context as if it were fully normalized as nearly all other communities on Lemmy are, i.e. it should not be opt-out, with that process gated by some technical procedure.
Ideally a third option would be available... however Lemmy has offered none, only an instance block procedure that to me seems horribly misnamed, as it functions really only as a community mute, but the users from the "blocked" instance can still troll you, outside of those communities.
It is a difficult problem to be sure, and one that each instance must struggle with as best it can - e.g. I agree that lemm.ee should not defederate from it, as that would go against their stated mission, although by the same token I think that Discuss.Online should defederate from especially hexbear to better match our own mission statement.
Lemmy allows instances to block specific communities, as LW does with the piracy communities
The incident where the mod said to the poster that he wanted to kill / shoot him, and that he hoped the OP would die soon was on !stardewvalley@lemmy.ml - a game community that afaik people would not expect to have a "struggle session" on (nor do I see how such language would be helpful even if it were?).
And hexbears constantly brigade people in other communities too, sometimes self-admittedly switching to their alts that allows them to get around Lemmy.World's defederation of their hexbear accounts.
These problems go far beyond one or two communities - they are institutional in what their admins allow, and sometimes even encourage. e.g. in this post I find this language very revealing:
Not the opportunity to talk with, discourse, engage in Socratic dialogue alongside, or communicate via back and forth exchange of messages, but "the opportunity to dunk" (implication: onto them, sharing with them the righteousness of your own cause, but in a manner not to convince and rather to look down upon while doing). Is it a wonder then that every conversation with them feels adversarial, when the very self-stated purpose (sidebar text and messages like these from the admins) of hexbear is to provide its users "the opportunity to dunk"?
It also is confusing to people to not see the instance name in the blocklist and yet not be able to access those communities either, so there's a transparency issue with that approach. Thank you for sharing it though - I thought that StarTrek.Website had been trying something funky all on their own as I tried to diagnose this issue with Farid there (in DMs), not realizing that was a provision in the Lemmy codebase. Still, while I don't think it's a viable solution to this problem, either for hexbear.net or for lemmy.ml, it is good to know that it exists:-).