Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their “drama communities” as well.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There’s also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts “as a bit” using wording that they were not aware is misgendering (“fella”) which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
This “struggle session” is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
But it seems a valid point that Threads has now tainted it, bc as we just saw here, people are going to immediately assume that it includes Threads?
I like how Threadiverse puts the focus on threaded conversations rather than Mastodon’s emphasis on people that you have to find and follow.
But I’ve taken to calling Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed (& soon Sublinks) as “Fediverse” again, to avoid the nefarious implications. Or even just “Lemmy”, since that’s where 99% of the actual content is coming from, from places such as Lemmy.World that holds >80% of the Lemmy userbase. Mbin is somewhat complicated by crossing over both Lemmy & Mastodon, and PieFed is a super neat project but currently has next to no content available exclusively on it (then again, if that’s the criteria, then Lemmy is basically the same as well, since everything is shared by federation:-D).
Worst of all is how Threadiverse is technically correct (the best kind of correct! 💯), since despite defederation from threads.net (or hexbear.net, or lemmygrad.ml, or lemmy.ml or midwest.social or whatever else people decide to block, individually or collectively), it is the same style of threaded-based conversations (iirc). It’s just that “Threads” itself is so hated.
After Sublinks is released I was going to write a post asking people what name they wanted to use, but I’m too curious now already to wait: what do you think? Isn’t Threadiverse too controversial and would drive people off that would otherwise consider coming here, e.g. from Reddit?
Ye it’s a problem term. I don’t know if it can be reclaimed, but listing all the software is also not great and most people think of microblogging when they hear “Fediverse”. Maybe “Nestedverse” or “Forumverse”? I don’t really have a good catchy term in mind.