Credit to https://literature.cafe/u/Janvier
Absolutely do NOT federate with Hexbear, but for reasons that have little to do with Hexbear’s politics.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin centered Fediverse), and I’ve come up with some observations that are true in August 2023 I think every new Lemmy instance should consider. I’ve split it into five parts to avoid Lemmy’s 10k character post limit.
1/5 – The Threadiverse is shrinking
There was a huge boom in Lemmy activity during the Reddit mod protest, but Lemmy and Kbin are not as mature as Reddit was when Digg dramatically enshittified. There wasn’t enough organic growth to capture the rain squall, and now the flood of users is flowing back to the ocean. It’s visible in the active user data, as well the pages of undermoderated single poster communities littering the wider Threadiverse where the last activity is two months old. New Lemmy instances continue to appear, but the total number of active users available for them to share continues to steadily decline. There’s a couple of obvious culprits for this:
Lemmy instances frequently become unavailable for unscheduled maintenance, due to operator inexperience and the rough edges of the software
Third party apps are still in beta stages or unreleased, and the interface leaves a lot to be desired, leaving many disappointed with the user experience.
Moderation tools are still in their infancy. Poorly moderated communities and inactive mods create the potential for very toxic experiences.
This does not mean the Threadiverse is failing; Reddit will continue to decline in quality, and if Threadiverse software and community continues to improve, we will reach an inflection point. Another major Spez event after that milestone will kill Reddit like Reddit killed Digg. To reach this goal, each new instance needs to bring something more to the table than extra space for fewer people to spread out in.
2/5 – Hexbear is a successful Lemmy instance
I support your account of Hexbear’s predecessor. I don’t share your background and naturally had a different experience. I think its useful to explain the history here for the benefit of other readers to better understand Hexbear’s current contrarian character, even if it is filtered through my limited experience.
Hexbear has its origins in the subreddit ChapoTrapHouse (CTH), a community that began its existence when Reddit was an open platform for fascist propaganda. Several subreddits were dedicated to mocking black people, spreading jewish conspiracies, bullying fat people, othering queer people, and sexually harassing women. My interaction with CTH was limited as a Redditor, but their participation as an antifascist group who were fighting back against those trends was a welcome presence. When the mainstream media started making a story about the racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, and the bad press threatened advertising revenue, Reddit banned the most overtly embarrasing subreddits. In an act of ‘enlightened’ centrism, Reddit banned CTH along with them. Perhaps Reddit blamed them for drawing the press’ attention, perhaps they didn’t want to be accused of being left-wing by going after fascists exclusively. But in any case, CTH needed a new address. That’s how Hexbear became one of the earliest Lemmy instances.
With several years to grow from a Reddit refuge to a full-blown social platform Hexbear has found its audience. They have site-wide movie nights where films are free-streamed and co-watched in chat. They’ve developed an internal stalinist-emoji based language (incidentally famous for causing problems because federated sites display the images at full resolution.) They have very active moderation, responding swiftly to non-party users stepping out of line with permabans. Dying communities like !anarchism are kept on life support with activity like mods creating regular general megathreads there where the community topic is irrelevant. If you’re transgender or non-binary and are looking to connect with others over North Korea apologia, there’s not a better place on the web to be.
While Hexbear is more eager to federate with others than others are with Hexbear, its size and activity proves an often overlooked point: Hexbear has become extremely successful Lemmy instance in spite of (or perhaps due to) having extremely limited federation.
3/5 – Moderation, not Federation, is the Threadiverse’s killer feature
Lemmy is not Reddit, and calling Lemmy a Federated or Open-Source version of its inspiration is doing it a disservice. Since Lemmy instances are not venture capital funded, continual growth is not the criteria for success. On Reddit, people who read, post, comment, and vote are the product, advertisers are the customers, and investors set the policy. Return on investment trumps all other concerns, and Reddit must continue to grow to be successful. Lemmy allows for a much more diverse set of definitions of success.
So the 0th step in becoming a successful Lemmy instance is deciding what that success looks like. That’s obviously up to the admin(s), but it can’t be achieved without skilled and dedicated moderators. Moderators do obvious tasks like remove spam and ban hate-speech, but they also encourage community activities, model conflict resolution, and produce content. A healthy community is a well-kept garden, and a successful Lemmy instance must include a collection of healthy communities. Moderators are the gardeners that help a community grow.
Moderation is a difficult and emotionally taxing job. I’ve alluded earlier that Reddit made an unforced error, degrading the moderator experience by killing 3rd party apps, and that Lemmy is missing those same essential tools due to its current stage of development. But Lemmy has an advantage over Reddit in there are plenty of instances where admins will listen to and respect their moderators. Lemmy’s codebase and 3rd party software is improving, and while Reddit may be able to improve their internal moderator support mechanisms, moderators will never be more than exploited rubes for them.
Since moderation is so difficult to do well, and is so essential to the Threadiverse project, the effect on moderators should be the primary concern in making any decision that changes the policy, culture, or performance of a Lemmy instance.
In my opinion what Lemmy lacks right now is diversity of cultures across instances. This is largely because these waves of users are the first major waves of users other than leftists who were part of the first purges by reddit (details here). The original culture differences between instances come from Lemmy trying to be neutral (for growth), Hexbear being dirtbag-left and left-unity, lemmygrad being hard marxist-leninist (anti-anarchism not fitting in with hexbear crowd) and Beehaw being an unknown factor that was promoted and helped by the lemmy team for the sake of establishing a liberal foothold so future waves wouldn’t be completely alienated. Other than this pretty much everything is new from the reddit waves caused by third party apps.
The lack of culturally unique and diverse places is a weakness that will only be rectified with time, with support of the spaces doing a good job of creating unique identities. This will set the platform up to be stronger when the inevitable next large event occurs causing significant waves of users. (and we know it’s inevitable because we know the IPO will fuck reddit up even more).
As for the huge central pots… I don’t actually think they’re avoidable. These are caused by two factors, the first is as you say - people who just want their content - this group just wants slop, and will churn off the fastest as they can’t find all the slop they need here because it doesn’t have and can’t be expected to have a hobby space for everything under the sun + porn (more than half of reddit). The second group of course is those who view the wider federation as an ideological battlescape, in which to wage an ideological war for people’s minds. The fascists have won round 1 of this by getting the marxists defederated from a bunch of places, these people view participation in the largest space as if it were participation in an information warzone, it is a theatre of operations to them. They will migrate to lemm.ee and other spaces though because the anticommunist objective of getting marxists defederated isn’t enough, they also need to wage information war in the spaces we’re still federated with. This will stretch them thin because they’ll be maintaining accounts on multiple platforms and ultimately increase burnout in their activities.
These people are probably best deprioritising for the time-being. Be mindful of the second group’s existence and on-guard for the concern trolling and sealioning that will be present and almost constant from them. In the meantime the main priority is to get communities that appear to understand how to create unique community cultures to WORK TOGETHER. These communities, despite ideological differences between them, are being staffed by people who have some sense for community management and collaboratively constructing something. If they can get over the ideological nonsense then there is a mutually beneficial thing that can be worked upon between them all and that is creating sustainable growth for lemmy as a platform and building up stronger networks for capturing future user waves. On top of this, finding the right attractions to get user-growth without such waves. At the very least enough user growth is needed to outstrip the user churn, which will be a persistent and forever-problem as it is for all online communities.