I think it has become more than apparent that our federation with Hexbear has degraded the quality of browsing on this instance. I’m generally for open federation, but the amount of brigading and general toxicity is not conducive to the friendly communications that make Lemmy great.
Ehhh, the fact that it comes up so often is an indicator that there’s something wrong.
The issues that cause people to make these posts (if you look at the content of the posts and assume they’re made in good faith) are consistently about the behavior of the people from hexbear.
Since the instance literally has discussions about disrupting other instances communities, I don’t think it’s at all strange to see a ton of calls for defederation.
There’s what, three apps that let you filter instances? Considering that solution is very limited (and doesn’t actually prevent the disruption intended by the bad actors that use hexbear), trying to say that the “real” solution is to uproot yourself, migrate via the migration tools, and hope that’s the end of it isn’t useful.
Calls for defederation are part of lemmy. It just is the ultimate solution to an instance being a problem. The fact that it’s currently the only instance wide way to prevent disruption from another instance just reinforces the reason the ability is there in the first place.
Per user defederation will be wonderful once it arrives, but it’s only useful when the instance you’re on chooses not to defederate from a disruptive instance and you can’t/won’t move away.
As boring as it is to see defederation calls, they aren’t going away.