Called the Iroquois Confederacy by the French, and the League of Five Nations by the English, the confederacy is properly called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy meaning People of the long house. The confederacy was founded by the prophet known as the Peacemaker with the help of Aionwatha, more commonly known as Hiawatha. The exact date of the joining of the nations is unknown and said to be time immemorial making it one of the first and longest lasting participatory democracies in the world.
The confederacy, made up of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas was intended as a way to unite the nations and create a peaceful means of decision making. Through the confederacy, each of the nations of the Haudenosaunee are united by a common goal to live in harmony. Each nation maintains it own council with Chiefs chosen by the Clan Mother and deals with its own internal affairs but allows the Grand Council to deal with issues affecting the nations within the confederacy.
The Haudenosaunee symbol of the long house, provided by the Peacemaker, is recognized in traditional geographic locations. Upon confederation each nation took on a role within the metaphorical longhouse with the Onondaga being the Keepers of the Fire. The Mohawk, Seneca and Onondaga acted as the Elder Brothers of the confederacy while the Cayuga and Oneida were the Younger Brothers within Grand Council. The main meeting place was and still exists today on Onondaga territory.
the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s constitution is believed to be the oldest, participatory democracy on Earth. What makes it stand out as unique to other systems around the world is its blending of law and values. For the Haudenosaunee, law, society and nature are equal partners and each plays an important role.
Haudenosaunee’s Legendary Founding
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- ⭐️ August Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
- 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
- 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
The lemmyverse is a distinct portion of the Fediverse that features sites like ours, which can be generally described as reddit-like, though with some obvious differences. Mastodon is also part of the fediverse, which features a decentralized set of twitter-like sites connected together, and so on for other fediverse sites. These can be variously connected together - Hexbear has a Mastodon instance for example.
Hexbear, which is a lemmy instance, is thus like a subreddit, and the lemmyverse is like Reddit, except it's all decentralized so nobody, not even the top devs working on the lemmyverse itself, can ban other lemmy instances, no matter what. This is also true of the Fediverse as a whole.
Federation means that a) you can see what other people from other instances are posting (but can opt out of seeing depending on your site options), and b) your account here will work anywhere, so you can go to lemmygrad and other instances we've federated with and talk with the people there. Others can federate with you if they like you and can defederate from you if they don't like you. So if you so desire, you could just go to the Hexbear front page (where you scroll through posts), click the "Local" option instead of "All", and pretend that we've never federated with anybody because you won't see posts outside Hexbear.
There are a lot of different lemmy instances. Some are big and broad, like lemmy.ml, while others are more hyperfocused. One could either decide to federate with all lemmy instances (except for a select few, a blacklist approach), or you could choose to federate with only a few lemmy instances and slowly expand the list to others as time goes by (a whitelist approach). We have gone with the latter option by community consent.
Lemmygrad is an ideologically communist (more specifically, Marxist) lemmy instance and so we obviously share a lot in common. There are some lemmy instances that have immediately defederated from us because of ideological differences (typically because we hate NATO, though also just because we're communists), which caused some hilarity here. But again, all they can do is defederate from us, they can't actually do anything (except raiding and trolling I suppose, but we are prepared for this) or go cry to some admins to ban us because they can't.