My namesake - Rottcodd.

Rottcodd is a minor character in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. He’s the caretaker of the Hall of Bright Carvings - a gallery of statues high up in a far distant corner of the castle Gormenghast. He lives there contentedly and peacefully by himself and rarely sees anyone, but through a window at one end of the gallery, he can see the castle spread out below him, and can barely make out tiny-with-distance people scurrying around doing… whatever it is that they’re doing.

And yeah - for better or worse, I identify with him so much that I swiped his name.

The only thing I don’t like about the fediverse is the constant stream of people blathering on about how “we” supposedly need to centralize and homogenize it and fill it up with botspam, so that easily confused morons with short attention spans will move here.

I loathe it with every fiber of my being.

I detest bot content in general, and bot reposts of Reddit content is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It’s not just tedious and unimaginative and unengaging - I honestly find it creepy, like someone stalking an ex-lover.

Broadly, there are two different ways in which a person so inclined can set about projecting the image of an aficionado of great literature.

One is to read, understand and be able to discuss great literary works.

The other is to sneer at supposedly lesser works.

Obviously, the latter is much easier. In fact, it doesn’t actually require reading at all.

They could be universally referred to by an entirely different term starting tomorrow, and the only thing that would change would be that that term would also come to be seen as a pejorative.

The simple fact of the matter is that the negative view of them is tied to what they do and who they are - NOT to the term used to label them.

Yes.

I have a friend who is extremely intelligent, endlessly curious and was raised in a locally well-established and notoriously generous and civic-minded family. So he was raised in that milieu of sincere kindness and generosity, and whenever he’s come across anything that interests him (which is seemingly something new every week) he seriously researches it until he understands it.

So it pretty much doesnt matter what the topic is - he knows something about it, but his personality has been shaped so that he’s attentive and considerate rather than pedantic and self-absorbed. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen him engage in obviously mutually enjoyable conversations with complete strangers over… pretty much anything.

I vacillate between thinking that it’s remarkable that he’s the way he is and that it’s remarkable, in a different sense, that that’s so uncommon.

That’s a hard call, and I’m glad it’s not mine to make.

On the plus side, engagement is a fundamental good, diverse viewpoints are beneficial and literature can play a role both ways in a relationship with hexbear users - both the things that they read and share and the things that others might share with them.

On the minus side, some significant number of hexbear users have demonstrated, and repeatedly, that… well… not to put too fine a point on it, they’re obnoxious assholes who flatly refuse to act civilly. And as unwelcome as that might be in other communities, it would be doubly so here, since an awful lot of the appeal here is that it’s relatively quiet and sedate.

The problem though is that that’s not all of their users - it’s just the most visible ones. If they were all assholes, the decision would be obvious and easy. But they’re not.

So…

I don’t think we can have any reasonable expectation that the asshole users will behave like decent humans. In fact, if you read through their discussions on their own instance, many of them are actually determined to be disruptive and abusive, and explicitly to the degree that someone might insist that they not be. Given the chance, they will do it. So the only way to be sure of stopping them is to not allow them to participate in the first place.

But then it becomes relevant that that’s not all of their users, and that this is a relatively non-political instance. It’s possible that those users won’t even bother with this instance, and while they’re off trolling whoever somewhere else, those among the hexbear users who actually can and will be civil will be the only ones who actually participate here anyway. Which would of course be fine, and even good.

So the way I see it, there’s no means of stopping the disruptive, abusive and bigoted hexbear users from being disruptive, abusive and bigoted other than defederation, but there is a chance, and potentially even a fairly strong one, that that particular subset of hexbear users won’t bother with this instance anyway, and the more thoughtful and reasonable ones will be the only ones who do. Which would absolutely be to our benefit.

I guess I would lean toward federating, but with a zero tolerance policy for disruptive and abusive behavior (and with the intent to follow that policy clearly communicated to the hexbear admin). At the worst, we could have a brief period in which the hexbear users prove that they can’t be trusted to not be assholes, and then they go back to being defederated.

But mostly I’m glad it’s not my decision to make.

I doubted this, so I tried it. I haven’t used google for ages, so I first had to search “google” in DDG, then I went to the main page. When I started typing it in, it suggested the full text of the search, so I thought it was even less likely that it would work like the OP said - that even if it had been the case that it previously did that, so many people have self-evidently done that search that the results would now be correct.

But no - there it was, right at the top - “While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter “K”. The closest is Kenya, which starts with a “K” sound, but is actually spelled with a “K” sound.”

And with that, I’ll contentedly go back to not using google.