I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone
there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB
enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides
proving my point Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to
scare me to take this down
interesting history thanks for this writeup, I knew about some of the history but never seen any true retrospectives on it, I only ever knew about lemmygrad and lemmy as a whole after the genzedong quarantine but even then I didnt make my first account until last year. Still, there are way more hexbear users than there ever were on grad even post reddit migration and many are just as if not more aggressive than genzedong posters especially when federation first began and hexbear still didnt get defederated so I dont quite understand why still.
I dont wanna start an argument but i know who you’re talking about and I do like her but I get that her posting style probably would be annoying if you were used to a much calmer community. honestly there are a lot of people on hexbear who are just as if not more aggressive and terminally online imo but I guess you probably just block them too
Still, there are way more hexbear users than there ever were on grad even post reddit migration and many are just as if not more aggressive than genzedong posters especially when federation first began and hexbear still didnt get defederated so I dont quite understand why still.
Because it’s not the same as suddenly introducing a radical change to the way your community behaves as a whole. Even though the instances somewhat had their own cultures, the federation was really tight-knit at the time and the overarching feel was more or less not combatative in any way shape or form (with obvious exceptions for new users who are about to be banned for the shit they’re spewing). When one user joins and they start a lot of arguments with genuine anger, it’s really easy to not engage if that’s how your community already is. That person will assimilate or figure out that they don’t belong. But when they join with an assortment of others to back them up each confrontation, it’s harder to keep the same coherence.
but it would be the same for midwest.social, the chaos of the reddit migration happened, things calmed down and then hexbear rejoined the federation causing another huge blowup
from my memory stuff had relatively calmed down on the fediverse before hexbear rejoined especially since midwest.social had already defederated from grad, a ton of the drama and craziness was between grad and like .world and the other new instances at least from my perspective as a grad user. what account were you browsing the fediverse around the time all that went down?
A .ml account. I did have an account on communism.lemmy.ml too, but I basically only used it pre-federation and when the federation was having issues. Once the federation was reliable I was browsing lemmygrad through .ml entirely.
hm i wonder if you being on .ml where the devs test stuff before they put it out in full release made the chaos seem even worse and seem even longer, but really I remember the tech issues really being mostly fixed by the time hexbear federated, v.0.18.0 came out in june and hexbear didn’t begin federation until august. I guess there was the scripting attack saga but that was fixed by the time hexbear federated too
I’m having a lot of trouble parsing what you’re saying here, to the point where I’m wondering if we were talking in different directions earlier in this thread without realizing it.
so when I first joined lemmygrad in 2023, it was pre reddit migration and so the site was relatively a ghost town (273 active users per month albeit before upvotes counted as an active user so the number may have been a little higher). grad was I think the 2nd biggest behind .ml, but ultimately federation as a whole was very slow, there maybe were 50 new posts across the entire lemmy federation every day? on grad it was never more than 20 at least and like i said they were the 2nd biggest instance and maybe even most active at the time as far as number of posts and comments goes. then the reddit migration happened as the devs were trying to do a huge update to switch between websockets and http, and that caused the running instances a lot of problems, websockets are very hard to scale compared to http and they were suddenly getting swarmed with users. Additionally, bugs couldn’t be quickly fixed because the devs had to scramble to complete the conversion to http. this finally happened in june which helped alleviate a ton of the technical issues admins were having to deal with at the time.
on top of this, there was both the huge clash between redditors and the existing .ml beehaw midwest.social users and also between the redditors and lemmygrad. midwest.social didn’t have to deal with much of the 2nd being that they defederated grad before the migration even took place. all this to say, I remember everything had calmed down to the relatively same level of calmness as before the reddit migration minus the huge increase in content available until hexbear federated in august and started up an even bigger shitstorm than grad caused because it is huge and it has even more aggressive users than grad users. all this to say it seemed like to me hexbear caused a similarly huge if not even bigger disruption to the federation than grad did (i mean good god I just looked and a post about hexbear had 600 comments on midwest.social, by far their most commented local post and that was even with it getting locked who knows how big it would have gotten without that) but still didn’t get defederated
interesting history thanks for this writeup, I knew about some of the history but never seen any true retrospectives on it, I only ever knew about lemmygrad and lemmy as a whole after the genzedong quarantine but even then I didnt make my first account until last year. Still, there are way more hexbear users than there ever were on grad even post reddit migration and many are just as if not more aggressive than genzedong posters especially when federation first began and hexbear still didnt get defederated so I dont quite understand why still.
I dont wanna start an argument but i know who you’re talking about and I do like her but I get that her posting style probably would be annoying if you were used to a much calmer community. honestly there are a lot of people on hexbear who are just as if not more aggressive and terminally online imo but I guess you probably just block them too
Because it’s not the same as suddenly introducing a radical change to the way your community behaves as a whole. Even though the instances somewhat had their own cultures, the federation was really tight-knit at the time and the overarching feel was more or less not combatative in any way shape or form (with obvious exceptions for new users who are about to be banned for the shit they’re spewing). When one user joins and they start a lot of arguments with genuine anger, it’s really easy to not engage if that’s how your community already is. That person will assimilate or figure out that they don’t belong. But when they join with an assortment of others to back them up each confrontation, it’s harder to keep the same coherence.
but it would be the same for midwest.social, the chaos of the reddit migration happened, things calmed down and then hexbear rejoined the federation causing another huge blowup
Totally disagree on this point. You’re right that it wouldn’t make sense if that were true.
from my memory stuff had relatively calmed down on the fediverse before hexbear rejoined especially since midwest.social had already defederated from grad, a ton of the drama and craziness was between grad and like .world and the other new instances at least from my perspective as a grad user. what account were you browsing the fediverse around the time all that went down?
A .ml account. I did have an account on communism.lemmy.ml too, but I basically only used it pre-federation and when the federation was having issues. Once the federation was reliable I was browsing lemmygrad through .ml entirely.
hm i wonder if you being on .ml where the devs test stuff before they put it out in full release made the chaos seem even worse and seem even longer, but really I remember the tech issues really being mostly fixed by the time hexbear federated, v.0.18.0 came out in june and hexbear didn’t begin federation until august. I guess there was the scripting attack saga but that was fixed by the time hexbear federated too
I’m having a lot of trouble parsing what you’re saying here, to the point where I’m wondering if we were talking in different directions earlier in this thread without realizing it.
so when I first joined lemmygrad in 2023, it was pre reddit migration and so the site was relatively a ghost town (273 active users per month albeit before upvotes counted as an active user so the number may have been a little higher). grad was I think the 2nd biggest behind .ml, but ultimately federation as a whole was very slow, there maybe were 50 new posts across the entire lemmy federation every day? on grad it was never more than 20 at least and like i said they were the 2nd biggest instance and maybe even most active at the time as far as number of posts and comments goes. then the reddit migration happened as the devs were trying to do a huge update to switch between websockets and http, and that caused the running instances a lot of problems, websockets are very hard to scale compared to http and they were suddenly getting swarmed with users. Additionally, bugs couldn’t be quickly fixed because the devs had to scramble to complete the conversion to http. this finally happened in june which helped alleviate a ton of the technical issues admins were having to deal with at the time.
on top of this, there was both the huge clash between redditors and the existing .ml beehaw midwest.social users and also between the redditors and lemmygrad. midwest.social didn’t have to deal with much of the 2nd being that they defederated grad before the migration even took place. all this to say, I remember everything had calmed down to the relatively same level of calmness as before the reddit migration minus the huge increase in content available until hexbear federated in august and started up an even bigger shitstorm than grad caused because it is huge and it has even more aggressive users than grad users. all this to say it seemed like to me hexbear caused a similarly huge if not even bigger disruption to the federation than grad did (i mean good god I just looked and a post about hexbear had 600 comments on midwest.social, by far their most commented local post and that was even with it getting locked who knows how big it would have gotten without that) but still didn’t get defederated