I wanted to provide a brief analysis of the top comments on blahaj lemmy and compared to lemmy world (who defederated from hexbear preemptively). The red comments favored federation and the blue ones favored defederation.
Initially I was browsing Blahaj Lemmy and couldn't believe how many top comments favored federation.
When I started browsing from Lemmy World (who preemptively defederated) the top comments were way more favorable to defederation. On the top comment, it looks like 50 upvotes (more than half) came from hexbear users.
Whether intentional or not, this is brigading. I'm happy that they're defederated. I really don't think that individual/local blocking is good enough since this has the ability to steer the direction of a lot of discourse, and I'd just not see it, but it would affect our instance the same. The effects of brigading still happen. I'd still see the same number of upvotes that would imply sentiment different to the actual users of the instance.
Also, is there any proper way to see where upvotes come from? I feel like this would be a good tool to vet botting, trolling and brigading. Also instance only communities (though I'm on lemmy.ca rn lmao) would be good.
Something I saw Ada mention, that I personally appreciate, is that we were cutting hexbear more slack than they probably deserved because they're another trans friendly instance. If a few bad actors can get you to defederate, that's a very quick way to isolate trans people from the rest of the fediverse. I agree that hexbear should be defederated, but I really think Ada's plan of giving things time to cool down before putting it up to a community vote was the best way of handling it.
Ada was handling everything really well. But yeah, Hexbear used to be Chapo, they had to make the migration to Lemmy because they were really bad about accidentally brigading shit and got banned from Reddit for it. Ada (and also me) gave them a bigger pass than they deserve instance wide.