It is a bit weird, and mostly for imaginary reasons. There’s a growing mythology surrounding our little instance.

I’ve done this one, let me know if you want to add other ones

Why not!

This is true, but it prevents external downvoting from influencing how posts are displayed locally on the instance (e.g. it prevents mass downvoted posts from being moved down the ranks).

To clarify: Not recently, they have been disabled for about a year.

It’s already in effect, though it probably won’t make a huge difference unfortunately, as most of the instances we weren’t linked with are very small. Ultimately we are a small instance ourselves which is why things are quiet sometimes - in time I hope that can change.

I will at some point try to see if I can talk with some of the larger instances that have defederated us, perhaps they can change their minds. That would make a larger impact, though my hopes aren’t high.

It’s not very sophisticated, we just sign up, start a community called “HC Embassy” or “Embassy of Hilarious Chaos” or something equally stupid, and start something akin to an AMA thread.

Haha yeah I’ll definitely need to be in a good mood for that one, but I’m curious too.

I was thinking I could sign up on their instances and open an “embassy” thread (or community?) to see if we can talk things out / dispel some myths.

🙌

I think it was the right way to go about it too.

Subscribing their communities is the main thing you can do. Similarly, they would need to subscribe to ours to receive our content.

I might try to reach out to some of the instances that have defederated from us, to see if we can reason with them. It all feels very irrational, maybe we can get them to see that the kitty isn’t scary after all. That’s one for when I have the time and patience though.

The idea of down votes and people using them to disagree is perfectly fine.

As you know, they are often not used in good faith. I’ve seen people use bots to mass downvote posts they don’t like, there are people who downvote everything coming from this instance as a default stance, or follow users around and downvote everything they post, etc.

This does influence how Lemmy displays posts here, so it can be a bit annoying. You could make a great post and have it immediately buried at the bottom because someone doesn’t like you, for example.

We’re happy to review this if people feel strongly about it though, it’s been a while since we last looked at it. Maybe make a post about it and see what others think.

No, it isn’t.

Hard to say, we’ll have to wait and see who gets it.

I personally think there’s no point for them to try and get it back, they’ll most likely come back under a different domain.

Apparently some old admin went afk and nobody else had access. So much for being a collective I guess.

Truly salt of the earth

They’re still poached though, all federation points to hexbear.net, domains are pretty central to Lemmy.

It will be interesting to see how they get out of this one.

This is true, definitely not a very happy thought.

As an aside, it looks like they have a back-up domain, the drama here is hilarious: https://chapo.chat/

Looks like they forgot to renew it, someone else snapped it up and now it’s up for auction. You could own hexbear I guess!

And they said romance was dead

That’s pretty wild. Alice tells me the mod team has changed recently, it sounds like the new mods are a different cut.

Hey, we do tolerate open and free discussion, certainly more than places like db0 do. You are allowed to have an opinion here and others are allowed to contradict you. As @[email protected] said, if it’s not breaking our TOS then it’s fine.

You and your community are welcome here, assuming it’s not particularly spammy.