PauliusIt Took 23 Days for Lemmy Posts to Double from 1 Million to 2 Million
guessing this doesn’t include hexbear.net because they aren’t federated yet but they have 270k posts and 3.6 million comments on their own, mostly well before the start of this graph, so it ought to start at more like 500k
But I’m so glad to see lemmy taking off properly, not just used for some niches. FOSS internet infrastructure that is accessible to end users is so important, it safeguards a lot of important freedoms, etc.
What’s the story behind this defederation? I missed that
it does basically boil down to what other people have said but I’ll elaborate.
Political disagreements from the admins of lemmy.world, and them taking the site’s zealous left-wing opinions and shitposting culture as prima-facie evidence that hexbear users can’t be trusted not to break lemmy.world rules (unstated which rules) by pushing “their beliefs and ideology”. It almost sounds good until you think about it like, at all. It’s an explicitly political instance (though honestly >50% of the posting is just news of the day and banter), so of course the users will by and large have those political opinions and post them. As long as they do so within the rules of lemmy.world I don’t see the issue personally.
I can sort of understand why tbf. Just playing the devil’s advocate here but the issue is that today it’s fine and shitposts are shitposts but Poe’s law will come into action at some point.
ZalackThat’s not the actual reason. Hexbear was openly advocating for their “army” to brigade other instances once it was federating. It just so happens that the basis of that brigading was going to be political.
Lemmy.world pre-emptivly decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of having to deal with that.
Ohh okay. I didn’t know the context but that sounds really bad. Brigading instances should be de-federated.
what’s the line between brigading and just getting into political arguments though? cause hexbear is plenty good at the latter, they used to fight among themselves a lot, but doesn’t really have a huge history of the former, they mostly keep to themselves since the reddit ban. Most I’ve seen is a handful of accounts posting in the defed announcement thread here, which like, fair enough, it was clearly a politically motivated decision. It’s hard to believe they’d be any worse than lemmygrad for example, if anything they fit the culture of the wider lemmyverse a lot better (not to say lemmygrad should be defed’ed either by a general purpose instance such as this, but there is more culture shock there than hexbear)
what’s the line between brigading and just getting into political arguments though?
What is the similarity?
Brigading is when you are targeting your entire group to a single post and attack users or disrupt the discussion.
Oh I’m not saying the overall opinions there are ironic and will stay that way, they are very much communists (and a notable minority of anarchists), and that isn’t likely to change, just that there’s also a lot of shitposting, and the general jokey tone seems to be what convinced admins not to take the “hey guys you have to follow the rules of federated instances when you post there” seriously