Yeah, had to scroll way down to see the comments, but although I think they are a bit dumb, there were other hexbear comments in that thread I agreed with.

This is one thing I struggle with. Some posts by hexbear users are so thoughtful, while others are so flippant.

I’m generally in favour of keeping the community open, supposing you have the ability to ban the trolls if you think it needs it (no idea if you can do that in Lemmy). Defederating just seems like a big step, and your right I find those comments mildly offensive at best but of course it’s your server so up to you the standard you want to keep.

What I want for a community isn't "not offensive", but actively friendly.

On the votes front, I believe as the admin you can see the vote counts? Are the really outweighing the local voices? Or is the proportion of lemmy.nz vs other instances consistent over time? I previously used my lemmy.world account to access lemmy.nz, and I imagine there are loads of people with accounts on different instances.

I can see the votes in the database. I've only checked specifically this post (and not any comments under it), but last I checked there were 23 voters subscribed to !newzealand out of 169 votes. That's regardless of which server their account is on.

I haven't checked this for previous posts. That could be an interesting thing to check, to see if it's unusual (the volume of votes is certainly unusual).

Given the low numbers currently I think finding ways to be more open is good, but I can also appreciate not wanting to deal with shitty behaviour.

I posted a reply here, that's a little different than my attitude up to now, but I think it's still a reasonable path forward - though again anything is only a proposal at this point.