Hey folks
I have been receiving a lot of messages every single day about federation with hexbear. Some of our users are vehemently against it, others are in full support. The conversation does not seem to be dying down, rather, the volume of messages I receive about it seems to be increasing, so I am opening this public space where we can openly discuss the topic.
I am going to write a wall of text about my own thoughts on the situation, I’m sorry, but no tl;dr this time, and I ask anybody participating in this thread to first read through this post before commenting.
Before I go any further, I want to be clear that for anybody who participates here, it is required to focus on the quality of your posts. That means:
- Be kind to each other, even if you disagree
- Use arguments rather than calling people names
- Realize that this is a divisive topic, so your comments should be even more thoughtful than usual
With that out of the way, there are a few things I want to cover.
On defederation in general
First of all, I am a firm believer that defederation must be reserved only for cases where all other methods have failed. If defederation is used liberally, then a small group of malicious users can effectively completely shut down the federated network, by simply creating the type of drama between instances which would inevitably result in defederation. In my view, federation is the biggest strength of Lemmy compared to any centralized discussion forum, so naturally I think maintaining federation by default is an important goal in general.
I am also a believer in the value of deplatforming hateful content, but I think defederation is not the best way to do this. Banning individual users, banning communities and establishing a culture of mutual support between mods and admins of different instances should be the first line of defense against such content. There are some further steps that can be taken before defederation as well, but these are not really documented anywhere (in order to prevent circumvention). The point is: for myself, defederation is the absolute last resort, only to be used when it is completely clear that other methods are ineffective.
Finally, I am wary of creating a false expectation among lemm.ee users that lemm.ee admins endorse all users and communities and content on instances we are federated with. Here at lemm.ee, we use a blocklist for federation, which means our default apporach is to federate with all new instances. We do not have the resources (manpower, skills and knowledge) necessary to pass judgement on all instances which exist out there, as a result, users on lemm.ee are expected to curate their own content to quite a high degree. In addition to downvoting and/or reporting as necessary, individual lemm.ee users are also able to block specific users and communities, and the ability to block entire instances is coming very soon as well.
Having said all that, in a situation where all other methods do indeed fail, defederation is not out of the question. Making such a call is up to the discretion of lemm.ee admins, and doing it as a last resort is completely in line with our federation policy.
Regarding hexbear
Hexbear is an established Lemmy instance, focused on many flavors of leftism. They have quite a large userbase who are very active on Lemmy (often so active that they leave the impression brigading all popular Lemmy posts). One important thing to note is that while some forms of bigotry seem to be quite accepted by many hexbear users (but seemingly not by mods - more on that below), they at least are very protective of LGBT rights (and yes, I am quite certain that they are not just pretending to do this, as many users seem to believe). Additionally, while I have noticed quite high quality posts from hexbear users, there are also several users there who seem to really enjoy trolling and baiting (very reminiscent of 4chan-type “for the lulz” posting), and it’s important to note that this kind of posting is in general allowed on hexbear itself.
The reason this whole topic is important to so many people right now (despite hexbear being a relatively old instance), is that hexbear only recently enabled federation. A combination of their volume of posts, their strong convictions, the excitement about federation, and the aforementioned trolling has made them very visible to almost all Lemmy users, and this has sparked discussions about the value of federation with hexbear on a lot of Lemmy instances.
My own experience with hexbear
I want to write down my own experience with interacting with hexbear users, mods, and admins over the past few days. I believe this experience will highlight why I am hesitant to advocate for immediate full defederation from hexbear at this point in time, and am for now still more in favor of taking action on a more individual user basis. Please read and see how you feel about the situation afterwards.
Background
My first real contact with hexbear users was in the comments section of a post in this meta community requesting defederation from hexbear by @glimpythegoblin@lemm.ee. That post is now locked, because several hexbear users very quickly started doing the aforementioned “for the lulz” type spamming of meme images in the comments (these are actually just emojis, but they are rendered as full-size images on all instances other than the source instance, due to a current Lemmy bug).
I did not want to take further actions in that thread in general (for archival purposes), but I did take one action, which in retrospect was a mistake: I removed a comment which contained the hammer and sickle symbol. I ignorantly associated this symbolism with Kremlin propaganda, and the atrocities my own people suffered at the hands of the soviet union during the previous century. Many users (including hexbear users) correctly (and politely) pointed out to me in DMs that the symbol has a much broader use than just as the symbol of the USSR, and people elsewhere in the world may not associate it with the USSR at all. I am grateful for users who pointed this out to me without resorting to personal attacks.
Let me be clear here: while I do not have anything against leftism or communist ideas in general (in fact in today’s world, I think discussion of such ideas is quite necessary), Kremlin propaganda has no place on lemm.ee. Any dehumanizing talking points of the Kremlin on lemm.ee are treated as any other bigotry, and if communist symbolism is used in context of Kremlin propaganda (that is the context in which I have been exposed to it throughout my whole life), then it will still be removed. But there is no blanket ban on communist symbolism in general on lemm.ee, and discussing and advocating for leftist and communist topics (as distinct from the imperialist and dehumanizing policies of the Kremlin) is certainly allowed on lemm.ee.
Hexbear user response
Coming back to the events of the past few days: soon after my removal of the comment containing the symbol from the meta thread, two posts popped up on hexbear. One was focused on insulting and spreading lies about me personally. Another was focused on diminishing the horrors of the soviet occupation in my country. In the comments under both of these posts (and in a few other threads on hexbear), I noticed some seriously disturbing bigotry against my people. There were comments which reflected the anti-Estonian propaganda of the current Russian state, things like:
- Suggesting that my people has no right to exist
- Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman
- Claiming that anybody critical of both nazi and soviet occupations is themselves a nazi and a holocaust denier
I expect to hear such statements from the Russian state - here in Estonia, we are subjected to this and other kinds of bigotry constantly from Russian media - but to see it spread openly in non-Russian channels is extremely disturbing. Such bigotry is completely against lemm.ee rules in general. Additionally, my identity is public information, because I feel it’s important for the integrity of lemm.ee that I don’t hide behind anonymity. Considering this, I’m sure you can understand why I am very worried about my own safety when people leave comments in many unrelated threads (where my original posts are not even visible), baselessly calling me a nazi and a holocaust denier.
Note that the goal of this post is not to start a new debate in the comments about the the repressions of the soviet union in Estonia or other occupied territories, but if the topic interests any users, I can recommend the 2006 documentary The Singing Revolution (imdb). The trailer is a bit cheesy, but the actual film contains lots of historical footage from the soviet occupation, and also many interviews with people who experienced it, who share stories which are deeply familiar to all Estonians. If anybody is interested in further discussion, then I suggest making a post about it in the Estonian community here: !eesti@lemm.ee.
Hexbear admin response
After the above events had played out, I reached out to hexbear admins for clarification on their moderation policies and how they handle such cases. I was actually very happy with their response:
- They immediately removed the personal attacks and dehumanizing comments containing Kremlin propaganda from Hexbear, and assured me that such content is always handled by mods
- They told me that while there are all kinds of leftists on hexbear, Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods
- They implemented some additional rules on hexbear to try and reduce the trolling experienced by many other instances, including ours: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
My personal take-aways
Let me play the devil’s advocate here and employ some “self-whataboutism”: among all users that have been banned on lemm.ee for bigotry, the majority were actually not users from other instances, and in fact people with lemm.ee accounts. If we judge any larger instance only by bigoted posts that some of its users make, then we might as well declare all instances as cesspools and close down Lemmy completely. I believe it’s far more useful to judge instances based on moderation in response to such content. Just as we remove bigoted content from lemm.ee, I have also witnessed bigoted content being removed from hexbear.
At the same time, I am aware of some internal conflict between hexbear users over the more strict moderation they are now starting to employ, and I am definitely keeping an eye on that situation and how admins handle it.
I am also still quite worried about the amount of distinct users on hexbear who have posted Kremlin propaganda. I so far don’t have reason to believe that these users are employed by the Russian state, but the fact that they are spreading the same hateful content which can be seen on Russian television seems problematic to say the least, and it remains to be seen if moderators can truly keep up with such content.
Where thing stand right now
I am not convinced that we are currently at a point where the “last resort” of defederation is necessary. This is based on the presumption that our moderation workload at lemm.ee will not get out of hand just due to users from that particular instance. My current expectation is that as the excitement of federation calms down (and as new rules on hexbear go into effect), the currently relatively high volume of low effort trolling will be replaced by more thoughtful posts. If this is not the case then we will certainly need to re-evaluate things.
Additionally, nothing is changing about our own rules regarding bigotry. Especially relevant in the context of Kremlin propaganda, I want to say that dehumanizing anybody is not allowed on lemm.ee (hopefully I do not have to spell it out, but this of course includes Ukrainians, LGBT folks, and others that the Kremlin despises), and action will be taken against any users who do this, regardless of what instance they are posting from.
Finally, I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users. I am super grateful to anybody who actually took the time to read through this massive dump of my own thoughts, and I am very interested to get a proper understanding of how our users feel about what I’ve written here. Please share any thoughts in the comments.
As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.
The only other thing I will say is that I genuinely appreciate that you’re building this community with your userbase and having these conversations, it’s the correct way to create a unique community culture and have people care about the space.
That’s not true at all. Look at any post about landlords or Zelenskyy or “bourgeoisie”. Count the number of pictures or references to guillotines.
I’ve already personally blocked the whole instance because it’s not worth arguing with people over and over.
Edit: you can see from the comments below what I’m talking about. I don’t care who these people think “deserve” the label of “subhuman”. I don’t want to interact with people who talk like that or think like that. That’s why I block them all.
I don’t know if defederation is the answer, but this instance is clearly a haven for these people. So I have already taken action.
Awoo has already noted some important refutations, but I want to unpack something here.
Landlords and Bourgeoisie are class identities. Importantly, these are not the result of things outside of your control (i.e. ethnic origin, nation, etc.) but instead determined by actions in the world. While one can’t say that one is subhuman because of where they are from, isn’t being a landlord (and thus extracting rent from people for shelter) a behavior? A series of actions and choices? And can’t we characterize a behavior or action as evil/immoral? Basically, when I say “landlords are evil and deserve to die or surrender their assets to the collective” what I’m describing is a particular set of actions. It’s not different from having an opinion on if murderers deserve capital punishment.
Btw, I believe in rehabilitative punishment. However, if we’re going to talk about people who deserve to die, I think capitalists and landlords are up there. A person who kills someone else – either due to mental illness or a crime of passion – is far less damaging to our social fabric than people who, through institutions, contribute to the death of our world and the immiseration of many. For instance, how many unhoused people have gone hungry/died because of the executives at Starbucks who decide that food thrown out should be covered in coffee grounds to be inedible? We don’t have the numbers, but shouldn’t we call this behavior subhuman/evil? I think you’re missing the distinction between saying the executive who designed that policy deserves the gulag – a specific inhuman action that deserves a specific response – and calling all insert ethnicity/nationality here subhuman.
This is highly offtopic flamebait that will trigger a protracted argument of little substance.
Further, how you’ve casually slipped into a debate about capital punishment for enormous swathes of population is disturbing and disgusting. This is the lack of self awareness that others have mentioned here.
lots of big words there sir that don’t really have relevance besides dictionary waving
Clearly you missed the “or”? Or is the choice to redistribute resources (rather than having billionaires like Bezos accumulating wealth by theft) odious to you on the merits? I don’t mind if Bezos were to turn Amazon into a worker-collective, for instance, rather than accumulate wealth extracted from his workers. Indeed, I would prefer this outcome (and it is in fact the original Marxist approach - the dialectical aufhebung of capitalism into communism).
Why are you still going on about this, it is so off-topic for the thread it hurts. You have completely deflected and warped the conversation, not even talking the OP, from which this is worlds apart but even from this single comment thread. And yet somehow you are +15 on upvotes despite this sort of behaviour being the reason this thread even exists.
Not brigading my ass.
This is why noone wants to interact with hexbear outside of your instance, this is why world got rid of you, this is why I block every single hexbear comm the second i see it in all and why I hope to god ml will have this conversation as well.
On topic, but I’ve actually had a couple of good landlords over the years. One guy would stop by once a month to check on the house and do landscaping. We used to have really good conversations when I saw him, and we would talk about how the neighborhood was doing, any issues with the house and so on and so forth. Whenever I had a maintenance issue, he would be there within a few days to handle it. He even kept rent increases to below inflation.
On the other hand, I’ve also heard people denigrate architects, lawyers, engineers, and tech support people. But landlords and lawyers in particular make great punching bags.
I mean ironically, the guy who kicked us out’s mother was totally fine. Just an old lady who needed the rent to supplement her fixed income. When she died, 6 months later the “I’m selling the place, you need to be out by X day” email came.
This is the kind of thing I really hate to see. It’s the reason I’m going to be leaving. You guys make a blanket statement like all landlords are evil because they extract rent for shelter. You don’t give any further reasoning. I’m sure you’ve collectively decided that through some illogical conversations on your home instance but you fail to make a valid point in the wild.
For example:
where are you expecting people to live?
These homes are owned by someone- they worked/paid/built them themselves.
Why do you think these people who have toiled for 40+years should just give you there invested money/work for free?
Why are they evil for using something they have worked for to help themselves?
Inevitably someone like you comes along and just shitposts this same rhetoric you just did with no logical backing behind it other than “evil landlords must die and be redistributed”
How is a house different from a farm? Or a rail system? Or a insert anything created by someone and used for personal gain?
Why don’t you go build your own house? Why aren’t you giving these unfortunate souls your own place?
To cap it all- you follow each other around in groups and rather than actually discussing you strawman, point people to communist propaganda, and generally troll anyone who disagrees with you. No one wants to join your club, no one wants to read your Marxism books etc. If you have a point- state it. Don’t point elsewhere and act like you won because we arent interested in your echochamber
I’m sorry. I do hope you come around to at least tolerating leftist perspectives before you leave for an echo chamber. That all wealth is created by labor is one of the core leftist beliefs, you’ll find anarchists, communists, democratic socialists, etc all agree on that.
In houses. There’s dozens of vacant homes for every homeless person. Just as capitalism requires some people be hungry to maximize profit of food, it requires some people be homeless to maximize profit of landlords.
The people who build houses deserve to be compensated for their labor. Owning a house on the other hand, is not labor.
Rent isn’t compensation for the construction of a home, otherwise the renter would own the home after 20 years of renting paid off the mortgage.
I’d categorize the parasitic relationship as evil, but as for judging individual people for the poverty and homelessness caused by that relationship, it’s more complicated as we live under capitalism.
Are you talking about the description of the cultural revolution in that one province in China people post? In the context of generations of peasants seeing their children die of starvation-related disease or conscripted never to return, the people were more merciful and practical than just. It’s easy to criticize any change if you ignore the violence of the status quo. To quote Mark Twain:
THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
It’s not.
My partner and I should have a 50 percent equity in the apartment she rented for 10 years. Instead we were unceremoniously kicked out last year because the landlord’s son wanted to make more money.
I accept this nuanced revision to my more angry framing. I have a personal vendetta, and this is actually the correct take.
This is a good post, but I think the person you’re replying to is trying to bait a ton of belief statements out of you so that they can then piss you off by contradicting each one with effortless status-quo normalizing, and use that as a justification to defederate Hexbear. That, or they’re just going to dig their heels in and you’ll have wasted your time.
Most of those questions are full of tacit assumptions, but I’d like to answer the general question “Why do you commies dislike landlords so much?” You may restate any of those questions or present new ones if you feel them to be relevant in response.
You complain about people citing Marxist literature, so let’s try citing the central figure of classical liberal economics, Adam Smith:
Wealth of Nations, Chpt 11 -- Excerpts
Obviously, Smith here is discussing a different type of landlord here, one who rents land for farming (etc.) rather than just habitation, but this contrast is largely to the detriment of the modern landlord as they leave it up to the geographic location of the rented property (i.e. availability of jobs within commuting distance) rather than have the possibility of issuing improvements to the farmland or otherwise assuring that rent can be paid by that individual.
The apologetics around landlords would have a chance if not for the basic fact that they operate on the principle of monopoly, as all of the land has been “accounted for,” it is all publicly or privately owned, and there are extensive efforts to keep people from sleeping on public land. There’s often no camping in a tent, there are specific “public awareness” campaigns encouraging private citizens to report those for destruction, and the settlements that remain are at any time liable to be cleared out by a police squad for the crime of existing. Sleeping on benches, when the benches aren’t specifically designed to prevent this, is “loitering” or “trespassing” (many public sites are officially considered to be closed at night), and in any case is immensely dangerous even if one only considers things like precipitation. Landlords make their profit from the fact that renting land and buying land are the only possible options for someone who doesn’t want to die of exposure or state violence. If there was land open for grabs and it wasn’t being bought up by land sharks, there would be very few homeless because they could at least have little shacks on such land.
Without the power of monopoly, rent would be drastically less, in proportion to the actual maintenance and management labor performed by the owner (or their property manager). We communists have nothing against paying for maintenance or management, but merely owning a vital resource that is monopolized is not a job.
Hey comrade, I’m on Memmy and the excerpt from Adam Smith won’t render, might want to check that out. I’m guessing it’s the one about landlords seeking wealth from land which they never toiled or something like that? There were a couple times he talked about the problems of landlords and rentier capitalism.
There is a difference between calling someone subhuman which is the rhetoric of people that believe that various races of humanity are more human than others(fascist master race rhetoric) vs calls to eat the rich through the use of guillotine memes. The latter is just radical and militant activism. The former is fascist rhetoric. The latter also has a place in mainstream society already as something that is regularly the centerpiece of art.
It appears posting memes about assassinating people for ideology is something that both extreme left and extreme right tend to do, and that’s something that non-extreme people, unsurprisingly, don’t seem to be fond of.
What are you talking about? Liberals post about the people they want to die all the time, you’ve just normalised them. Go mention homeless people in the San Francisco subreddit and watch all the liberals turn into hitler in seconds. Don’t get me started on what happens when you mention Roma people to european liberals. Or what happens in literally every single thread on China.
Besides, we’re not talking about assassinating people. We’ll put the billionaires through our courts beforehand just like you guys put poor people through your courts don’t worry.