So, I thought Hexbear defederated from us a little while back, and we, in turn, defederated from them. Why do I keep seeing occasional (new) Hexbear posts in the "All" feed, lately? Did the defederation get reversed? Is it somehow a bug?
They turned off federation from their side, so their instance is not federating stuff to us directly at the moment, but other instances still occasionally federate things Hexbear users have posted there, so that's probably why you are seeing them around every now and then.
The decision on lemm.ee was much harder as the average user did express desire to remain federated however the admin team decided that a temporary removal from our allow-list was the best option.
as expressed by users belonging to marginalized groups, comments from .ee users are often lib-shit and in some cases outright hostile. While many on hexbear love dunking on these lost libs the duty to protect marginalized users is much more important.
I think the main issue is that for most of the time we were federated, lemm.ee admins were not getting reports about lemm.ee user activity on Hexbear communities (Lemmy didn't have this feature until 0.19), so if anybody used a lemm.ee account to harass users on Hexbear (and I understand this did happen), there was no way for lemm.ee admins to even find out about it. In general we have a very aggressive zero tolerance policy for bigotry (and that includes transphobia), but if we don't receive reports, then it's hard for us to take any kind of action.
I didn't realize that was possible. I thought instances only federated out their own content. Intuitively, it still seems lile that slcould be some kinda bug.