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I respect your absolute discretion as administrator to run the instance as you wish, but I would like to provide my humble perspective.

User's blocking an instance is not an alternative to defederation. I'm not talking about hexbear but if an instance is promulgating hatred and intolerance, then their impact can still be felt through comments and vote manipulation. I'm not talking about an antisocial comment that would attract a moderator's attention. I'm talking about the insidious manipulation of perspectives through vote manipulation that we all know occurs on social media.

FWIW I think every large and well run instance ought to have a policy & process where by federation / defederation is resolved. These are the circumstances in which we will defederate, and this is the process we will follow when considering whether or not those circumstances have been met. Although of course I acknowledge that the time and resources required to develop such a thing are limited.

As an aside, I suspect that the lemmyverse will fracture in the coming years. I'm not suggesting this for aussie.zone but in the future, I think many users will want to have instances federated by white list rather than black list, as in "we only federate with these other instances" rather than just federating by default.

My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.

Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.

But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions engaged in by Hexbear. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they're cribbing off of to respond.

I remember one once saying "we are terminally online and proud of that". pretty much the sort of people you would expect

The issue isn’t exclusively with our communities though, because they still show up elsewhere.

Yes, we’re still federated with them. You can check the federation status of instances by going to [instance-root-domain]/instances.

In that thread, you’ve got:

• Multiple users sarcastically pretending not to know what Beehaw is
• A user making fun of them
• "Don’t let the door hit you on the way out." Incidentally this is the comment that inspired me to make this post.
• A user literally just laughing

And of course many of their users in that thread have the trademark transphobic sarcastic pronoun indicators.

Not one comment from a Hexbear user that’s actually providing valuable commentary. These are comments that are deliberately setting out to be mean, and do nothing more than that.

Many users from other instances that are critical of Beehaw in that thread (some great examples are azuth and donuts) are at least explaining why. Hexbear users are just arseholes, and seemingly proud of that fact.

There are rude users on other instances too, but not in such a high ratio as in Hexbear.

@trk Coming from Mastodon, I have already learnt that it's not worth putting up with the negatives just to get a few extra users.

@Zagorath

Is it worth growing if the growth is coming from toxic users? Hexbear users aren’t providing us value, in my opinion. Nearly every time I see them, they’re being rude arseholes. They set out to cause other people pain. If the growth of the Threadiverse requires letting in people who are deliberately hurting others, is growth really worthwhile?