We’ve already defederated one tanky instance, and frankly I think I’ve rarely had a positive interaction with Hexbear users. Their defence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or of China’s genocide against the Uighur people, is hard enough to stomach. But what prompted me to post this is their commentary in this thread where even without any of the propaganda-based reasons to justify their beliefs, they seem to delight in being rude arseholes to people.
Personally, I don’t think they provide us any real value, no we’d be better off without them, just as we are better off without lemmygrad and exploding-heads.
My question about that option is: what effect does it have? My understanding is that if we defederate, they can see our content and reply to it, but only other users on their instance will see those replies.
Does an individual blocking them do the same thing? If so, perfect.
But if, as I suspect, it still allows them to see and reply to comments and everyone else in the fediverse can see it, I cannot support it as a solution to dealing with the kind of bad faith interactions engaged in by Hexbear. It allows them to continue peddling their rubbish without even enabling the person they’re cribbing off of to respond.