Update: Although we officially still have a few days remaining on this vote, it seems clear that this proposal won’t be voted in.
Thanks to everyone for their feedback and votes! I had expected a split vote on this one and it turned out around 1/3 for the proposal and 2/3 against, so that is a quite emphatic no! And of course, we will respect the vote.
I hope we can maybe revisit our instance blocking policies more generally after lemmy has properly working per-user instance blocks, as some folks commented as it will open up more options for personal choice. For example, we could keep a list of sanctioned instances (like csam site) as it works now, but maintain a separate list of “use with caution” instances (aka hesitations in fediseer) that are blocked by default in each user’s personal blocklist. But now users could choose to enable those sites for themselves if they wanted to.
For me, that seems like the best overall solution for user choice, and for the new user experience. But it may not sound good to you folks, so that’s why we have the voting system in place so we can get quality feedback and also hopefully generate ideas for improvements that will benefit the community.
On that note, anyone can contact me or any of the site admins if they have a proposal they want to appear here on the governance community, and we’ll be happy to help you out.
Unruffled
Hi mateys. I’m gonna keep this short and sweet because I don’t really have any skin in the game on this one. I am in fact quite happy to leave this decision up to the wider dbzer0 community. On that note, please do not comment on this post unless you are a dbzer0 user - we’d prefer not to have anyone else weighing in.
This post isn’t to convince anyone to re-federate or otherwise. In fact, our admin team genuinely doesn’t know for sure what our community sentiment is on the topic, or whether or not it’s worth a try. My guess is that the community will be quite divided on the topic, as many users are on the topic of hexbear. But the only way to find out for sure is to ask you, so here we are.
But I will say that for me personally, although we still have the occasional drama, and despite past run-ins, I have slowly grown to appreciate having some hexbear users around to help balance out all the turbolibs. While I think its fair to say our instance and theirs will never see eye-to-eye on certain topics, we have coexisted with them in relative calm over the past 12 months. If we can achieve harmonya ceasefire with hexbear, then maybe we could do the same with lemmygrad?
I’d also prefer our users to make their own choices with regard to instance blocking of leftist sites in particular.
Obviously there will be some folks here that will hate this idea, and some who think it is worth a try and/or would like to make their own choices with regards to blocking. All I will ask is that you go have a look at lemmygrad.ml before you vote, and ask yourself if there is anything posted there you think warrants keeping them defederated?
Because this might be a divisive topic, I’m setting the threshold for this proposal succeeding at >66.6% majority rather than the default >50% so that there is a clear mandate.
The proposal is as follows:
That dbzer0 removes lemmygrad.ml from our blocked instances list for a 1-month trial period. Another vote will then be conducted to either federate permanently or to reinstate the instance block.
Notes
- AFAIK none of our admins have discussed this with lemmygrad prior to this post, so we don’t know how they will respond, even if this vote succeeds. But having just checked, we are not currently blocked from their end, so in theory re-federating will be a straightforward process (at least technically).
- We really don’t want to cause a big rift in our instance over this, so please there is really no need to get into heated arguments (I mean, what are the chances? Lol). Your vote is what counts most and we will commit to be guided by the voting outcome.
- If this vote succeeds we will reach out to their admins to see if we can come to some mutual agreement about reintegrating our communities while hopefully keeping conflict to a minimum. Having said that, some conflict is probably inevitable ngl. But I think we will be able to ride it out ok.
- I’ve covered a lot of concerns and talked about conflict a lot, so I’ll just add that the big positive of re-federating is that there will be a ton of new users and content to interact with, which will hopefully add to the Lemmy experience for our users if the proposal is voted in.
expiry: 7
Acknowledged governance topic opened by https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/flatworm7591
This is a simple majority vote. The final tally is as follows:
- For:
- Against: (5),
(2), (4), 
(3), (1), (1) - Local Community: -0.6
- Outsider sentiment: Positive
- Total: -10.6
- Percentage: 25.00%
This vote has concluded on 2025-07-23 03:17:20 UTC
Reminder that this is a pilot process and results of voting are not set in stone.
deleted by creator
how the heck am i supposed to read this somebody help 😭
Welcome to lemmy culture! Actually I have no idea either so we’ll learn this together!
This is all explained in the sidebar links
Thanks!
Top just says who opened the topic, and below it the type of the vote (there are discussions and simpje voting)
Each user has a relevant flair, like admin/donator/etc. The ‘for’ tells the total of all the relevant users flairs (not everybody has flairs!)
The against is the same thing but with downvotes.
Local community / total? I have no idea lol
Percentage is the ratio of upvotes against downvotes (only counts votes from dbzer0 users)
Outsider perspective is the same but for non dbzer0 users, and doesn’t show a percentage.
The rest just tells when the vote ends and a footnote
“local community” is dbzer0 users who don’t get an individual vote as they’re not supported or vouched for, but are tallied together at a 1/10 ratio.
“total” is the absolute for minus against tally.
Noob question, but do I have to add a top-level comment to get my vote accounted with my flair, or is that done automatically by the bot without having to comment?
You don’t have to comment.
Thanks!
For an exact tally at 2025-07-19 13:55 UTC:
Internal: 85 for, 149 against
Outside: 39 for, 20 against
This info is from gregtech.eu I think, with 17 upvotes and 0 downvotes unaccounted for from defederated instances like .ml and hexbear (hexbear has downvotes disabled).The huge negative total is from the supporter votes.
As an aside, I think when one of the tallies of “For” or “Against” has enough votes to turn from a list to a bucket-list (i.e. object and number of occurrences, not a list of objects with repeats), then the other should do the same. Else it’s a bit confusing to read.
- For:
Giving it a trial run might be okay though I’d lean towards leaving things as-is.
Does kind of feel like the overall community wouldn’t be too thrilled. I’m having a hard time understanding why the instance would be entertaining a change now. Like I can’t think of any communities I care to participate in over there, just seems like spamming up people’s All feed for no discernible benefit.
OTOH you have a point, people can do instance blocking in their user settings so that is an option.
No.
Lemmy already has serious issues of political divisiveness driving off new users. We don’t need to further that “to own the libs”.
While I don’t truly think that’s why this is being suggested, we don’t seem to have a good reason to refedrate other than “they appear to be behaving lately”.
Also, the optics of the timing of this occurring right as Admiral Patrick is closing dubvee over (among many things) the general tone of discussion on Lemmy being abrasive as all hell in large part due to political division spurring disrespect? Not a good look guys.
I have slowly grown to appreciate having some hexbear users around to help balance out all the turbolibs.
Same. There’s a difference between socialism, anarchism, communitarianism, communism, etc., and too many turbo libs chock all of that rich political tapestry up to “tankies”.
While I do think there are dictator apologists out there, I don’t see the down side to open communication so long as there’s healthy debate. As soon as ad hominems are introduced, where people are attacked and not their ideas, I think that’s when we draw the line.
I don’t really have any experience with lemmygrad though. Hexbear I’ve started warming up to. As with Lemmy.ml
Edit: I’d say let’s try the month period and see what happens. And if this doesn’t work, I don’t think that should be the last time we try to federate. We should elect to keep an open mind to see if things change. I do think that dbzer0 should allow users to block entire instances though. One of the reasons I came to dbzer0 is because lemmy.world banned too many instances that I was interested in.
So yeah, count me in. Aye
deleted by creator
One of the lines in the sand for me is when people are unironically pro North Korea. I don’t want that on my feed.
And to a lesser extent I don’t want to see weird tankie bootlicking of China either. And I’m not talking about legit good things China has done when compared to other superpowers, I’m talking weird posts that read like full propaganda state sponsored bs, and if you disagree with them in any way they will dig through your intire account history to try and find something they can use instead of actually having a discussion about the topic you originally disagreed with.
Authoritarians don’t want open discussion they will just link you half a shitty book explaining how there’s actually no such thing as authoritarianism.
Edit: I’d like to add that searching lemmygrad for Ukraine will show some really awful takes. I want freedom for Ukraine same as Palestine, Tebet, Hong kong, el Salvador, ect just because the main empire in the west is on the fascism side of authoritarianism doesn’t mean I will cozy up to other authoritarians.
You can always block the entire instance on your end
I joined this instance because it drew a line in the sand. Non authoritarian spaces are so rare online.
Federating with grad doesn’t magically change the structure and makeup of this instance, it will still have the same governance, communities, admins etc…
And as already said, your personal boundaries are not violated by this, as you can define them yourself here on the Fediverse (there is a feature called “block”, yk)
You do still get those in comment sections of dbzer posts then.
Also I’m not sure if lg posts on dbzer subs would essentially form enclaves, where if enough dbzer users block them they basically get the space for themselves but external visitors and new users are seeing that lemmygrad lite on our instance.A very good point that gets overlooked a lot in this discussion.
FYI I made a revision that solves this issue, check pinned comment. Not to sway your opinion, feel free to vote however you want :)
I’m in favour of this tbh. I wouldn’t even put a supermajority on this. Why? Because people can just block entire instances on their end.
IMO it’s not up to instances to limit user’s feeds and interactions, unless OFC there is significant amounts of malicious intent, behaviour etc. on the other end.
Personally I often don’t see eye to eye with them and dislike their revisionism and acceptance of Dengism, but if they’re anything like Hexbear, they’ll have some genuine leftist tenencies.
EDIT: If we don’t get the supermajority, we can always go for a trial period and see how things go from there. I suspect that it’ll be similar to hexbear
Also please, anything to balance the shitlibs from .world.
On another note: it’s curious how .worlders often having the most reactionary takes, but some PPL here seem to have no issues with that
Hard disagree. Honestly, this would even be a compelling reason for me to leave this instance and spin up my own. I wanted to try out running an instance for quite some time now, and this would probably push me further toward that. That wouldn’t have an impact on my moderation efforts, e.g. in c/piracy; there would be a smooth transfer.
little rant
Honestly, there are even more points that bother me about this instance. For example, the outright hate for cryptocurrency. Yeah, I’m aware of the anarchist theory of having no money or currency at all, but the first step is perhaps creating a better currency/money system with fewer inherent issues. It’s hard to objectively judge whether crypto is better or worse per se, as there are always some positive and some negative aspects, but I don’t understand why an anarchist instance pushes for a state-controlled, state-issued currency and hates decentralized attempts to create a currency controlled by the people. Sure, I don’t like Bitcoin either, especially because of the privacy concerns, but Monero is a solid option with privacy/anonymity as a core design feature and an algorithm that makes using GPUs or ASICs unfeasible to try to democratize the mining process. At the same time, the criticism of AI, a similarly controversial topic, is restricted by policy. This doesn’t make sense to me. I neither love nor hate AI, and I neither love nor hate cryptocurrency, but I think we should be able to have healthy and constructive debates/discussions about both without any instance-wide restrictions.
I vote no
Big no.
Echoing from what some others have said, I went back 3 days worth of content from them and found ZERO worthwhile posts.
At least hexbear is somewhat funny in their shit posts, and it’s easy enough to block or filter users who constantly post in their begging for money community.
Meanwhileongrad exists for a reason. I’m content enough to see the smoke from the self immolation that happens from afar.
No, I don’t think I will.
Absolutely not, this is a terrible idea considering that they were defederated for being toxic and aggressive to our overall community, and also many people there are disingenuous in their takes, it’s not a discussion community, it’s brigading. The only way I could ever support anything like this is if their domain expired and someone used it to make a completely different instance.
That hasn’t happened so I can’t support this.
I’d be willing to give it a try. They can be frustrating at times, but to me it’s not really worse than with liberal instances. I’d understand if the community here doesn’t want to put up with them though.
I haven’t checked it out in a couple years, but I remember there being several decent communities over there. But their more authoritarian communities are pretty shitty.
I’m in for a trial. Different viewpoints are good, and worst case scenario, we just defed again.
I’ve had nothing but good experiences with hexbear in my lemmy history, I think, but then again I value more the communities than the users, and thus I prefer instances that won’t arbitrarily keep me from getting good content from elsewhere. I tend to not track where a user is in the Fediverse - every internet dog is free to create accounts anywhere, anyway.
But… comparatively speaking, lg.ml seems to have little if anything to offer in comparison. The “tinted left” stuff that I care about can be more easily found in l.ml anyway.
I’d say give it a two weeks trial. A full month might be a bit too much, both for the people pro and con.
No thanks.
