Who is "they"? The entire instance? Every single user in every single community on that instance You don't think people around here spread lies too?

Hexbear and lemmygrad were instance-wide operations. They existed for the purpose of disruption. Lemmy.ml is not that and has never been. It holds a large body of individuals who share the same beliefs, but that's not the whole instance.

And are we establishing a dedicated, impartial, fact checking body to evaluate everything? If not, then defederating the entire instance based on "lies", determined by people with their own biases, is about as slippery a slope as you can possibly get.

Besides, you keep talking about "lies" but what I see in the evidence you linked is mostly about admin actions. So let's not punish the users of either instance for their admin, let's open some dialogue about it.

But the greater issue here is that the whole concept of this federated platform is basically moot the more fractured the federation becomes. If admins can't put aside biases and commit to the idea of federation, then it isn't going to work, and this would create the most evidence of that. I agree the admin actions over there are eyebrow raising, but the biggest instance defederating from one of the other biggest and oldest instances is cutting off our arm, their arm, while making this whole thing less useful and even more confusing for new users.

I don't know if there's a good answer, here. Rogue admins in charge of massive instances is not something that can be dealt with easily. But defederating is going to cause more issues than it solves.

Defederation is a tool of last resort. Before taking that step as a community we should attempt to engage the admins to align them towards more acceptable behavior. Migrating communities away from instances with petty and abusive admins is always a good idea, and this absolutely qualifies.