cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or “how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme”.
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
I’m in the Lemmy.world bubble trying to educate myself about the rest and evaluate if I might need to migrate someplace else. And also trying to figure out the difference between instances. But I can’t figure out what “based” means or is referring to?
Thanks for this btw! It’s really informative
I’m going to
shillsuggest lemm.ee, it’s a lovely instance that isn’t defederated from most (for better or worse, some people can’t stand hexbear but soon lemmy will add the ability to block instances at the user level, rather than defederating) and the lead admin is very sharp with the development - he’s even helped other instances when they’ve had major issues and he’s made various contributions to the lemmy codebase. It always feels like we’re getting the latest and slickest version of everything, with fewer bugs than other instances.Yup I was on world and switched to lemm.ee and I love it for the above reasons
Blocking instances on the user level doesn’t solve the core issue which is that Hexbear brigades, trolls and harasses enmasse in the first place. Their comments might be hidden for you, but they’re still a problem for everyone else. Blocking them is really just putting a bandaid over the problem.
Hexbear doesn’t brigade from what I’ve seen, there’s just more of them and they’re very active. If a post is at the top of your feed it’s likely to be at the top of theirs also.
If you haven’t seen it, that’s genuinely surprising. It’s what they’re known for at this point. Any thread about China, Russia or Ukraine gets flooded by them on any instance still federated with them. They shut down discussion, spam huge ugly emojis, and argue in bad faith to defend authoritarian regimes. They aren’t being defederated enmasse for being well-behaved.
The huge emojis is a lemmy bug, one which has basically been fixed (at least the lemm.ee admin seems to have fixed it, I imagine he’s pushed the code to the main stack but others won’t necessarily have adopted it yet).
I remember seeing a bit of a burst of them interacting with stuff when they first federated, but since then it died down massively - and not just because they’d been defederated, but in the threads they were still a part of. The novelty quickly wore off and users on both sides started noticing where they were posting more (hexbear users when they step out and lemmy users when they went in to hexbear) and behaving accordingly. Frankly, I’ve seen far more posts spamming moans about them than actual things to moan about.
Do you still feel this way? I bought that excuse prior to our federation with them, but they literally made 1000 comments on the first post made on our main community about them. Then when another user made a post on our main community asking how to block them, they brigaded that post too. I understand that they have a large and active userbase, but that’s completely irrelevant. Lemmy.world is 10x the size of hexbear and their users have never disrupted out local communities like that in 3 months of federation, hexbear did it multiple times within 24 hours.
I don’t understand how that can be classified as anything other than brigading. They did the same shit to blahaj.zone and lemmy.nz, and those are only the ones I witnessed firsthand, I’m sure there are many other examples.
Brigading is where people go from one post in one place to another post. Eg, when hexbear have a post about some argument they had somewhere else, if users came from that post and found the original post that could be brigading - particularly if users are calling to arms to get people to go there, or linking directly to it. Generally, hexbear users do not do this. Hexbear users see the same feeds we do, as such they see the posts and they participate in them.
I think they’re abrasive and many of them seem to get off on that, but the best way is to generally not engage with those ones and have civil discourse with those that are a little more mature.
According to whom? Simply because they’re not stupid enough to make a post on Hexbear saying “let’s go here and spam” doesn’t mean they aren’t brigading. Not to mention that for all we know, they do coordinate via discord or any other channel; the only evidence we have against that is their word, which is obviously bereft of value. And by the way, they constantly discuss dunking on other servers, by which they mean brigading.
Just because Reddit used public posts calling for brigading as unequivocal evidence of brigading in order to justify disciplining subreddits doesn’t mean that such evidence needs to be present for it to be called a brigade.
The top definition on urban dictionary states brigading is A concentrated effort by one online group to manipulate another. (e.g. by mass commenting)
The second definition states: When people from one group, organization, fandom, forum, server, etc. aggressively infiltrates, usually spontaneously, a rival forum, server, or stream; negative criticism is usually given to the victim of a brigade (the event itself sometimes being called a raid), with insults and counter-signaling common. Usually used in the past participle (“brigaded”).
Deliberately and repeatedly, they spammed threads that are clearly intended for local discussion with hateful comments, emoji spam, and inside jokes. If you refuse to acknowledge their behavior constitutes brigading, then you’re surely being willfully obtuse.
I had a very similar opinion fewer than 7 days ago, but now I am compelled to dispute it, because I recognize that their toxicity is far more disruptive than I realized and in fact frequently prevents any civil discourse from even being possible.
I don’t have the opportunity to engage with any of them anymore because they brigaded the shit out of my server for 2 days and forced defederation. Now the only way for me to interact is to comment on their server, where I’m even more exposed to the numerous hateful and abusive members of their community. As you can see, the “abrasive” members of their community dictate the terms of interaction for all of their users. You cannot simply choose to interact with one member of their server, they come as a package deal. If I try to debate a point with one, I get 5 other tangential bad faith discussions to distract from the argument at hand.
TLDR Hexbear without brigading is like communism without authoritarianism. Technically possible, but I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime at this rate.
“Based” means the person using it thinks whatever they’re referring to is incredibly awesome, a paragon of virtue.