hexbear.net is "A leftist social platform centered around community building through discussion, shitposting memes, and sharing content." They are fairly large:
hexbear.net were not a federated instance until recently, when they announced their intent to start federating with a select group of other Lemmy servers.
lemmy.world claimed to see ulterior motives behind this intention and decided to pre-emptively block hexbear.net from being able to federate with them.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the largest Lemmy instance thinks it has a duty to protect its users against anything that might cause upset, sometimes before it even happens.
I think this is awful for free speech because you’re removing people’s autonomy, creating an echo chamber sound bubble for far left views, and isolating people on the right which…ironically creates a echo chamber for them as well. Hell, it even confirms for someone like Spez on reddit or Elon Musk on Twitter that “they are the barons of true free speech because we won’t ban you when you say something we disagree with”. Completely awful behavior.
It takes a strong stomach, good articulation, and about the time to take one shit to present a well reasoned argument for someone with views you disagree with. God forbid someone should be slightly uncomfortable.
I wrote a larger comment about this here: https://lemmy.ca/comment/1973583
I agree with you. Writing off 24k people because you’re afraid some of them want to actively preach their ideology feels shortsighted. It’s also bad admin work, since there’s nothing stopping the zealots from creating accounts on lemmy.world and doing the very thing they’re trying to prevent, except now it’s harder to identify them.
I see a lot of people making the argument that we shouldn’t give a platform to political extremes, implying that the majority of people are so gullible and stupid that they will be radicalized if we don’t shelter them from these dangerous ideas. I don’t believe in treating people like they’re gullible and stupid, I think everyone has a right to decide what they engage with for themselves. As you say, echo chambers do not help anybody.
If it respects the house rules, then it should be able to stay. Preemptively deciding that 24k people are rule breakers is a bit extreme.
That said, lemmy.world has set themselves up for this in the past when they banned other political instances like exploding-heads.com. They’re committed to this path now - damned if they do, damned if they don’t.