Based on recent events

Prefacing with the TL;DR since I went much longer than I meant to and don't feel like deleting lol. But I thank you for seeing that most HB users (that voted) value keeping federation with dbzer0. The rest of my reply might be pointless nonsense, so fell free to stop here.

I also have a HB account in addition to my lemmy.ml I am obviously replying to you now with. I also voted that we should stay federated along with many others (which as you saw was a large majority). While there are real moments of hard trolling that I see, the shit happens with lots of other instances that aren't .ml, lemmygrad, or HB. It is something that happens no matter old internet, new internet, federated, mega social media sites. One person's troll is another's friend depending on so many factors. Some of which is even misunderstandings turning into people just all jumping in all due to said misunderstandings. While others are intentional, but might not be malicious and just taken the wrong way (completely text-based communications are constantly taken wrong).

For example (in my case) I might take a post or comment differently depending on which account I am using. But not notice right away that the source is from an instance that I don't have an account on. So I might comment with a take thinking of the instance I am on (and therefore a different understanding of the regular vibes) and be taken much much differently than I mean. Sometimes I delete a reply right after posting when I see it is not from the instance I am using.

I personally get taken wrong by people IRL when I am fucking around due to strong sarcasm and sometimes lack of expression on my face. My main point is that a lot of people on HB, Lemmygrad, and .ml actually like lots of the boards on dbzer0. I personally make sure to subscribe to the same boards from dbzer0 on my different accounts just to make sure I see the information, guides, and news no matter which I am signed into.

And like many (if not most) of the comments in the vote on HB to stay federated or not (and some folks from dbzer0 in this thread), people do find the exposure to other instances to be of value. We can learn lots of things that we might never have if not faced with such exposures and interactions. There will always be people that make problems that really aren't helpful. But it really doesn't help to make sure everything is reduced to pure echo chambers and just "other" everyone else. It guaranties that hate grows as the "others" are just spoken badly of and enforces not bothering to try to interact. It allows lies about the "others" to not be questioned.

HB doesn't want to defederate because they lose more of their power as trolls and propagandists if they do.

Blocking certain instances improves the experience by a huge amount, but it really isn't sufficient. I don't really need to encounter edgy teens saying that they hope America collapses and everyone inside gets murdered.