I mean, they're voicing a position, much like you do. It's important to not just have 'exit' approaches, 'voice' is important as a contribution to the development of a community. That doesn't mean that an owner should be beholden to the users, but it's perfectly fine to have dynamism and exchange in what instances are. We construct them collectively, and over time.

Instead of pushing back against your opinion, I must confess what you said would work if there was a seamless way to move accounts and communities from one instance to another. Unfortunately that's currently not the case.

It's also worth noting that an instance itself can change philosophy. It seems .world is moving from generic Lemmy to pro-world bank/imf/NATO Lemmy. I'm not necessarily for or against any of that, but I signed up for a generic Lemmy, not an echo chamber.

That works if the instance openly expresses a general policy on defederating , and then adheres to their own policy. Based on the whole pre-emptive threads defederation that many other instances took part in, but lemmy.world did not, it seemed like they were aiming to be a very open instance - their stated reason for not cutting ties with threads was to have a wait and see approach and actually give them a chance before assuming it will be a problem (and it’s not like meta has a stellar track record either). Now with hexbear they are taking an immediate defederation, no chances approach. It would be nice to get some clarity on the general criteria for pre-emptive and reactive defederation in order to make those home instance decisions.

If a given instance wants to experiment with democracy, that’s awesome!

Agreed and that's what I'm suggesting lemmy.world do. They don't have to, but it'd be nice if they did, even informally. A simple, "Hey, what do y'all think?" would be nice, before they make a decision that significantly impacts our collective experience.

As for preemptively defederating from trolls, I can appreciate the argument, and if that was the only justification given, I wouldn't be so concerned. But the admins also cited political opinions that fly in the face of their own branding: a "generic" instance "for the entire world to use". Had they included "you must love the World Bank and IMF", I wouldn't have joined this instance in the first place, just like I didn't join beehaw. It's not that I hate those orgs, but I don't want to be in an echo chamber.

So would anti-world bank/imf folks be able to share their outfits on !streetwear@lemmy.world if .world hosts the community but I moderate it from some other instance? I have my doubts, but I'm no expert on the fediverse. I want to see everyone's streetwear, not just from people of a particular political alignment.

This isn't about hexbear in particular. It's about how these decisions are made. But for the record, if hexbear users actually started trolling en masse, I'd be in favor of defederation.