In case anyone else is as confused as I was: yes, we are defederated from Hexbear.net. This image is simply hosted there.
Let's just say there's a reason we moved to the place where defederation is an option...
After all, any instance can pickup some of those and isn’t representative of the instance as a whole.
I think I speak for the whole admin team that we actually do hold instance owners responsible for the communities they host, the same way we hold Reddit (the company) responsible for the communities they choose to host. That said, we made the decision that (for now) the best practice for handling large general purpose instances like .world or .ml is to take a scalpel approach until such a time comes that the Threadiverse is more resilient.
While ostensibly a "general purpose" instance, users on Hexbear had a tendency to come to our hosted communities and aggressively push propaganda, unfairly burdening our mods, so it was a much easier decision to de-federate. We actually did announce that one because of their size.
(Also FYI in case you're not aware you are posting form lemmy.world so just to be clear none of these policies apply to your current account!)
EDIT: I also think it might be useful to highlight that we never take actions against other instances, we take actions for our users/communities.

Here is our FAQ. What kind of communities are you most interested in? I'd be happy to make some recommendations.
Bookstack is great!
Things may be uh- crispy for a few hours while we get re-Federated and all the other instances whallop us with traffic. It should pass within a day.
True, but following the instance directly can be a bit of a firehose of information since you get ALL posts and comments. We wanted to have a place to alert for scheduled maintenance, events, and stuff like that.
Just a quick update for everyone, yes OP is right and a bunch of bots signed up. We've purged them from our user count and enabled CAPTCHA. Email verification is coming soon as a secondary deterrent.
For the record nobody told us that it's not safe out here. We were aware that self-hosting was wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross; but has NO IDEA that it wasn't for the timid. 😉
Yes it was, BUT OUR TIME IS FINALLY NEAR 🎶🎸



I have no idea where you're seeing a million, I'm seeing 1,300. But that's still very high for the fediverse! And it's definitely the highest we've ever had in one of our local communities.