I wanted to provide a brief analysis of the top comments on blahaj lemmy and compared to lemmy world (who defederated from hexbear preemptively). The red comments favored federation and the blue ones favored defederation.
Initially I was browsing Blahaj Lemmy and couldn't believe how many top comments favored federation.
When I started browsing from Lemmy World (who preemptively defederated) the top comments were way more favorable to defederation. On the top comment, it looks like 50 upvotes (more than half) came from hexbear users.
Whether intentional or not, this is brigading. I'm happy that they're defederated. I really don't think that individual/local blocking is good enough since this has the ability to steer the direction of a lot of discourse, and I'd just not see it, but it would affect our instance the same. The effects of brigading still happen. I'd still see the same number of upvotes that would imply sentiment different to the actual users of the instance.
Also, is there any proper way to see where upvotes come from? I feel like this would be a good tool to vet botting, trolling and brigading. Also instance only communities (though I'm on lemmy.ca rn lmao) would be good.
Now that I've looked at lemmy.world, beehaw and lemm.ee myself, you might be closer to right than I initially thought. The amount of comments in the first thread on the blocking instances, lemmy.world and beehaw, is much less than the federated instances, blahaj.zone and lemme.ee. The vote amounts on the blocking instances agree with each other and the amounts on the federated instances agree with each other.
I think that's sufficient evidence to conclude something is up. I'm going to suspect lemmy.world and beehaw filtered out hexbear comments and votes when they federated the post. This would suggest brigading from hexbear users. But I would need to view the vote database to be sure.
A server that defederates does not receive any updates from the other one, including upvotes and comments.
I think for it to be brigading would require a planned response, people organically reading and responding to comments is not brigading, even if the people from the same instance happen to think the same way (not surprisingly, in this case).
It wasn't coordinated as such, but they did link to our post in their dunking/call out community, and that post hit their front page. That was the source of a huge amount of traffic from Hexbear
That original post definitely ended up bridgaded, I just don’t think their votes in your defederation post was the same thing.
From my understanding of how federation and communities work is that the instance hosting a given community receives the postal, comments and votes for that community from other instances and then sends the combined data out to other instances that requests that data. Users from instances that aren't federated could still interact if they both used a community on a third party instance they were both federated with. But I could be wrong about all that.
And your right. Brigading is probably too strong of a word outside of evidence of coordinating action.