The instance seems to be mostly right wing trolls. I know defederating is unpopular but I don't think much is to be lost in this case and it can save the mods some headaches.
Edit: the response on exploding-heads.com to my reporting of transphobia. Courtesy of the "second in command"
I'm not saying we should immediately defederate, but the reason I originally went to check them out was partially because of this comment and the reply from dick@exploding-heads.com
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/207742
When he made that reply, it got rapidly upvoted to +7, while my comment was also sitting at about +7. This morning, several hours later, when a bunch of actual sh.itjust.works users woke up and read the thread, the ratio of votes changed in my favor.
I fear that we are going to deal with a significant level of brigading from that instance, and unlike reddit we don't really have any tools to combat that.
They also had a good laugh about the troll who posted here about getting us defederated by beehaw. They really don't like beehaw, or gay people in general.
It's whatever but we are already defederated with lemmygrad.ml and I feel like this stuff is on that same tier.
this is an interesting post-reddit effect, we have people of all different types and motives seeking new places.
A lot of people seem to think this is an all out battle between a new community and reddit. Like we have to beat them or something. The situation with reddit is not a win-lose, reddit would never go dark overnight. A lot of users are just over reddit and moving on. I personally don’t care about lemmy becoming the next reddit nor do I really care what happens to them.
A big difference to me with this migration is the instances seem to attract like minds. This is going to be a very interesting event to watch how the fediverse grows and changes.
I personally do see this as a war against reddit and the corporate internet. But we are just marshaling the troops, we aren't about to march into battle.
I think this migration is different for two reasons.
Firstly, because the main users who were alienated were the mods, app devs, and long time redditors. The composition of the exodus is infinitely superior to the voat migration for example.
Secondly, because the platform of Lemmy and the fediverse provides actual value due to the ability to federate. You can't get the combination of access and protection that this platform might eventually provide on regular social media.
I had a look through their hot-page and couldn't find anything on the level of lemmygrad. Do you have any examples?
https://exploding-heads.com/post/100772
Many of the trolls on that thread aren't actually from that server, but they clearly reside in the same dark corner of the internet. But yeah its not really as bad as I thought in terms of needing to defederate, I thought they had over 1k users acting like that but I guess I just replied to the wrong person because the server is mostly dead.
But I have to say, I've never encountered people with such a burning hatred of redditors. Again, it's whatever but I wouldn't be bothered if we did defederate.
I think we should stay federated with them. They haven't said anything wrong or bad yet.