Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.

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Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:

  • “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
  • “The West’s role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
  • “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term “rules-based international order.” It is in the Left’s interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to “dismantle western propaganda” and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

Here are some examples:

“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

Overall community comments:

To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.

We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

  • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Yes I do mean the time the official gamingcirclejerk team asked you to stop the misrepresentation of this GCJ, which is literally stealing the branding, and the graphics created by the official team on the subreddit, and presenting itself as a continuation of it. I asked you to resolve it. Whether that meant putting the official team in charge, or whether that meant some other resolution, because attempts to reach out were being ignored. I am not misrepresenting that conversation, neither are you really I don’t see a reason to contest that other than me as topmod, nobody suggested anything other than the existing team being added to it, most likely in the existing hierarchy but we didn’t get that far in conversation did we? So given there’s no much disagreement on the content let’s just skip to the end eh?

    Antik: “And what’s wrong with there being two GCJ’s? Surivival of the fittest basically. If you have a better team you can outgrow the current GCJ on lemmy.world easily - especially since you will be linking from the original subreddit.”

    GCJ: “Because it’s our labour? After 12 years of putting in the work to build and manage the existing community it sticks in your throat to have someone come along, use the same name, take the branding that we made with our own hands so they can benefit in taking over from the 12 years of labour that we performed to get it to where it is. If you worked on lemmyworld for 12 years, brought it up to hundreds of thousands of people with a history of thousands of media articles about its antics and influence on the industry you might also have a problem with someone else then using the same name, graphics and branding to take over simply because they typed in the name first.”

    And there was no response from then on.

    After discussing it with some of the team gossip got around various reddit mod backrooms and bish bash bosh nobody wanted to have anything to do with this space anymore because it doesn’t respect the work and effort people put into creating those communities and bringing them up to what they are today.

    Like, what exactly did you expect this response to do? Inspire faith in the way this team respects other teams, wants to maintain positive relations and genuinely does care about the work people put into their communities? It was flippant. And the expectation was that same flippancy about everything would be the experience modteams would all get if communities were made here - so they weren’t, with completely valid concerns.

    And now what’s happening? More incredibly shortsighted decision making. This topic is going to come up every single time lemmyworld is ever mentioned now. It is going to haunt the site. And on top of that the site already struggles with clear wreckers trying to harm it, coming from fascists or from some other instance that wants to see it fail or maybe reddit, who the fuck knows. And now it’s taken the risk of adding thousands of extremely pissed off and sleighted leftists to that, completely unnecessarily, because you know damn well they absolutely wanted to play nicely. Are these the actions of an instance carefully thinking about its health(avoiding drama that inspires unstoppable wrecker behaviour that constantly cripples the site) and maximising its growth(networking with and promoting the transition of users from elsewhere) while promoting a positive environment(making people nice to each other instead of hostile)? Fuck no they’re not.

    • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You seem to be leaving out the parts where you asked me to remove the current mods from the community. And where you said that the GCJ community “might not understand my actions” and become hostile basically.

      So honestly I already stopped caring about whatever you had to say afterwards.

      • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Nah mate pretty damn sure I told you I wasn’t sure what the position of the team would be until further discussion… A further discussion that didn’t happen because ignoring that response sealed everything.

        At this point communications have clearly broken down to the point we will nitpick forever though.

        • Antik 👾@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I told you I would contact the moderator of the community if you let me know what you would be willing to give. I asked you if you were willing to work with the current team and you said “that depends on the vibe”. So you were asking the community to be forcibly handed over to you while giving me NOTHING to work with. And instead of having a discussion with “the team” to find out what their position was you relied on me to do your bidding.

          The moderators of !gamingcirclejerk@lemmy.world weren’t even using any of the artwork or branding you were talking about. I went over to the subreddit and both the banner and icon were completely different.

          The amount of reddit mods that contact us and asking for some kind of special treatment is insane. This is not reddit 2.0, but good news: LW is not the whole fediverse. Why not make your gamingcirclejerk community on lemmygrad or hexbear?

          • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            weren’t even using any of the artwork or branding

            Yes they were. That’s not true again. It has changed since which is certainly an improvement, but hardly the whole issue.

            Looking at lemm.ee maybe, but thanks for the suggestions.