Recently I was asked if we'd be willing to reconsider federation with Hexbear, followed by CARCOSA reaching out to me to see if it was something we'd be open to.
They made a post asking if their community was interested in refederating with us, similarly I'd like the opinion of our local users.
Why refederate?
Hexbear has a decent number of sizable active communities:
- https://hexbear.net/c/games
- https://hexbear.net/c/technology
- https://hexbear.net/c/movies
- https://hexbear.net/c/food
- https://hexbear.net/c/vegan
These all seem fairly well moderated, giving us access to more diverse posts and viewpoints. A lot of our feed right now is dominated by US centric communities, and it'd be nice to get some more variety.
Why not?
They love trolling and I don't expect them to follow our rules when commenting (primarily "be civil").
Just looking at their thread about us, there's a significant number of immature replies slandering us / Canada. I'm not confident their users will engage in actual discussion in our threads, rather than just showing up to throw out insults and memes.
We can try to handle this by banning users / blocking specific communities, but that's going to increase moderation workload for both admins and mods. Hexbear is self admittedly quick to ban users on their side, but they also don't mind ban evasion - not ideal for us.
So what's next?
This is where we solicit your opinions, how does our community feel?
Edit: Well, it looks like the community is overwhelmingly against refederation. Decision made, thanks everyone for your feedback!
I'm somewhat open to it, IF moderation can keep up with the increased workload. We have to make it clear that while we might welcome new opinions, call us all libs or whatever, we need to show no tolerance for users engaging on Lemmy.ca solely to be a nuisance, which we saw quite a bit of last time. If there's a sizable contingent over there still intending to sow (-๐ฝ-) chaos it's probably not worth the effort to re-federate.
Hexbear users can run their communities like a zoo all they want, but they have to leave the zoo there when they visit other servers.