Lots of people who are seeing top-level postings about Hexbear. Net are probably confused about what has been going on and I want to give an SRD-style overview of the whole thing.
Note: As a user of Blahaj.Zone, I am not a neutral party in this and I do not pretend to be. This is how the whole thing has played out from my perspective.
Hexbear. Net is another Lemmy instance that had relatively recently started to federate with Blahaj.Zone and other Lemmy instances. It had previously been known as Chapo.Chat because it began as an instance for fans of the podcast ChapoTrapHouse.
Recently users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) began to complain about the behavior of Hexbear users. The complaints were about rude, obnoxious behavior: Hexbear users calling people "libs" as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin,...
Such behavior was not necessarily forbidden on Blahaj.Zone, but certain sub-Lemmys had their own rules on these subjects.
One of the threads about Hexbear: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1854795?scrollToComments=true
After an ever increasing number of users calling for defederating from Hexbear. Net, Ada (admin of Blahaj.Zone) opened a thread to talk about it. The thread was quickly inundated with Hexbear users, complaining in turn about being called out in this way. Though many of their comments exploited a current bug in the Lemmy code which resulted in emoji's being embedded as pictures which results in lots of image spam.
Ada responded by removing top-level comments in the thread which were not from Blahaj.Zone's users, because she wanted to get the feedback of her own community, not from anybody else.
This happened originally in this thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1959801
The discussion on Blahaj.Zone was a back and forth: Lots of people calling for "leftist and queer unity", others complaining about getting harassed by Hexbear users.
Meanwhile, elsewhere: Lemm.ee, a Lemmy instance operated and managed by someone from Estonia, also opened a discussion about Hexbear - at least partially motivated by the admin's increasing unease of the rampant denial of soviet atrocities and the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine was also an issue.
Lemm.ee was largely encountering similar problems as Blahaj.Zone, though the Lemme.ee admin admitted that the Hexbear admin was generally responsive to reports and complaints.
The thread on Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536
The thread was also flooded with comments from Hexbear users. The admin of Lemm.ee also responded by hiding most of the comments from Hexbear.
https://mastodon.social/@brooklynman/110911292961470110
Back on Blahaj.Zone, a tangent opens up: A Hexbear user complains about c/196, the new home of Reddit's r/196 which had relocated to Blahaj.Zone and has been its biggest community ever since. The Hexbear user complains about their comments being removed, comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs. The user posts pictures of the removal notices.
Blahaj.Zone's admin Ada steps in and intervenes on behalf of the Hexbear user, having a stern word with the c/196 mod responsible for the removal of the comments.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2136643
A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy's banner, because it contains "fuck tankies²", arguing that tankies is a slur. The c/196 mod refuses and publishes their message.
[²"Tankies" is a pejorative term for authoritarian socialists in the vein of Stalin and/or Mao.]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1961004
While the discussion if Blahaj.Zone should defederate from Hexbear is still ongoing, the Hexbear admins defederated from Blahaj.Zone without warning from their side, because of...
unaddressed ableist removals from the /c/196 moderators, defense of chasers, no-quarter rules regarding our users, leakage of good-faith DMs from our admin team, and a general lack of initiative to punish these behavior
In her a response to these events, Ada points out in a comment that she never had the chance to adress the ableist incident (she was in bed) while other issues had happened in the past and had been adressed at the time. Thus she could not react before Hexbear defederated.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135406
TL;dr: Blahaj.Zone's users complain about ill behavior of users on Hexbear. Net. A discussion about defederation begins on Blahaj.Zone. Meanwhile Hexbear users complain about Blahaj.Zone in turn and Hexbear. Net defederates instantly and without warning.
Fair. I did see the discussion yesterday. On that note I'm really new here, has blahaj def often before?
We’re picky with who we federate in general, and there was the high profile defederation of lemmynsfw that kicked up a bunch of dust.
I thought that one was a bit too knee jerk for my taste, but I have very different boundary conditions to Ada on that one. I’m ok with her drawing a line, even if I wouldn’t have.
Oh ok. I don't know anything about that instance but anything NSFW can be touchy. Thanks for responding. I'm so used to being berated about asking silly questions it's a super nice difference here and I'm glad I moved.
I wasn't here for what happened, but I saw the thread on both servers about it, and here's the whole thing as I understand it:
A user here saw a photo they thought was of a minor, reported it as such, and it was also thought to be so by whoever followed up on it. They reported it to Lemmy .NSFW, who, upon further review, found out it wasn't and was of a porn actress who often does "cute" looking pictures.
While this was going on, Ada looked at the community it was posted on, which was focused on porn in a "cute" aesthetic. The description of the community had some concerning language in it that made it sound like it was hosting pictures intended to look like porn of minors. Ada asked .NSFW to do a clean sweep of their communities and do something about this specific community, and they refused.
This came to a head that resulted in Ada defederating from .NSFW and posting a thread about why. They also posted a thread on the subject on their own server, which, from what I read, largely consisted of them saying Ada was overreacting and personal attacks against Ada, with screenshots of messages out of context to make Ada look bad. While this was going on, the community in question also quietly changed their description, removing the concerning text.
TL;DR: Blahaj had concerns over possible photos of minors on NSFW and asked them to do something about it. They refused and posted a thread basically saying Ada was a triggered snowflake (not in those exact words) when Blahaj defederated from NSFW.
I see. Ya, I'm going to have to say better to err on the side if caution with that one. Knee jerk or not think that was probably the right move.
I am completely cool with the owner of an instance seeing something that concerned her both morally and legally, and cutting it the fuck off.
In general defed doesn't bother me that much, I can always make an account on lemmynsfw; if you're using a decent client it's easy to manage.
To be fair, considering the free-for-all that was Reddit, I'm not surprised about Reddit migratees calling any kind of active moderation overzealous.
The moderation here in general is pretty tame compared to non-Lemmy fediverse standards. Otherwise I bet ya .world would be defederated/otherwise silenced ages ago.
One of the reasons I ended up here was because Beehaw did just that.
I switched instances early on because feddit.de defederated too much. I noticed, that even on communities from instances that feddit was not defederated from, I could sometimes only see like half the comments. That's not a good basis to try and partake in discussions. Then again, feddit's defederation list is only ~half as long as blahaj's.
Feddit(.de i assume) seems to exclusively defed from other Lemmy instanaces with a few exceptions. The blocklist here is (AFAIK) synced to the main blahaj.zone which also includes a fair bit of non-Lemmy instances due to it being a microblogging-oriented instance.