Fun fact : it’s my first ever post on any lemmy instance/community
…which is messed up…
Okay tbh I don’t know if I should have posted this some place else or if here is just fine
So I’m brand new here, I’ve joined as lemm.ee was going to shut down. I only chose Hexbear because of how big and active it is, and of course for all its shade of leftism (being far left myself) but tbh that part was just a plus for me, what I wanted more was an opened enough instance, an inclusive one with enough peace of mind (not having to deal with unhinged/oppressing posts/comments daily).
But I started noticing that actually Hexbear had been defederated from some big instances like lemmy.world, upon trying to understand why I stumbled upon lemmy.world BS post explaining they did it for preemptive reasons (wtf 💀), obviously I just dismissed lemmy.world entirely and continued enjoying my time here. But then I noticed other instances like Blahaj blocked Hexbear as well and a bunch of others, I never found out why.
Then, while trying to understand what’s with all the defederating I stumbled upon a lot of negative noise against Hexbear, claiming you lot are doing some horrid stuff like war crimes denial, trolling, hate speech, spreading pro-Russian propaganda (like anti Ukrainian stuff don’t misinterpret me here, I’m fine with anti-western views or western propaganda skepticism), so much so I don’t really know if what I read was some kind of fascists trying to slander this place, or people confused about Hexbear political views, or if it’s linked to some Hexbear history I’m not aware of… It’s just weird because so far I haven’t encountered anything I could hold against this instance, for all I’ve seen you’re all sweet and making nice content, haven’t seen anything unhinged, but what makes me uneasy is this defederating thing, I can’t help but wonder why.
I’m really confused. Can someone explain to me what this is all about ? Is it just some right wing noise, some unknown drama or what ?
Edit (in case any of you see it): Thanks a lot everyone for all your answers, kind words, jokes, emojis and for being so welcoming. What you all said was very informative, and most of it I sadly expected. Having taken a liking to lemmy I knew that whatever I’d learn it’d be a cause for concern, it saddens me that several instances, big ones at that, would just make more room for the far right by suppressing leftists and spreading hate. As always in any such case I can’t say I’m surprised but it worries and disgust me nonetheless. Anyway I’m glad I found this place :)
it’s common for haters to exist envious of those whose powers are beyond their grasp
That’s why .world is just a waiter at the table of our success.
Lot of good answers here, but also, welcome!
This is a fine place to post your question also, sometimes people comment musings for discussion on the general megathread but you’ll get more replies with a post.
Thanks :)
Yeah I wish I could have a way to reply to everyone (feels wrong not to), I don’t know any other way other than adding something to my post and hope some people will see.
its mostly just right wing noise, the the side of lemmy that mostly includes world is in general very liberal and right wing (in part because of admin moderation and another because most reddit users are libs/right wing) so they really dislike any opposing views, in the case of world we were preemptively defederated because one of the world admins at the time was a neolib that pushed for that.
nowdays its mostly just making strawman to get angry at since we arent federated with most of the big comms anyway and ml and grad arent that big to influence much, which is kinda funny because they have slowly turned against other kinda leftist instances like dbzero and midwestsocial as the next evil radicals
also we defed from blahaj because her admin refused to moderated ableism and transphobia against our users
its mostly just right wing noise
Yeah expected as much…
also we defed from blahaj because her admin refused to moderated ableism and transphobia against our users
wtf I didn’t expect that 💀 I think I even expected anything but that…breaks my mind
You got a bunch of answers, so I’mma just say hi.
Always happy to see new users, and I love my leftist comrades
. There is technically a /c/howdy comm if you wanted a more chatty intro.
there’s a dedicated hate comm called meanwhileongrad where all the worst anticommunists on lemmy/piefed/mbin gather together to circlejerk about how horrible hexbear, lemmygrad, and lemmy.ml are, it’s where a lot of the animosity originates from these days
It’s mostly just liberals and fascists and their natural hatred for socialists.
I will say that the anti-Ukraine thing is kind of real. Nobody here thinks Russia is secretly communist or anything, but Ukraine was overthrown in 2014 by a neo-nazi aligned, US backed coup. They then spent the better part of a decade persecuting ethnic minorities in Eastern Ukraine, which overwhelmingly supported the overthrown government. The stuff they were doing would have gotten a non-US aligned government branded as cultural genocidaire, but they kept escalating and eventually were firing artillery at civilian centers regularly and sending neo-nazi death squads into the East to harass and murder civilians.
Nobody here wants the war there to keep going and causing all this suffering, but the idea that this is a black and white conflict and Russia invaded for no reason at all, or because he just wants to expand Russia, is not common here.
Yeah I was uncomfortable bringing up the «pro-Russia propaganda» thing, I am aware what’s going on in Ukraine is no simple topic, in the context of my post it was more about war propaganda which in some cases I can be fearful of. I’m not gonna lie though as much as I’m quite open to pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine sentiment I’m not pro-Russia myself, I’m just distrustful or at the very least careful, but it has to do with the financial ties Russia has with the far right in my country, the fact that in the past they managed to make a media outlet in my country that spread misinformation benefiting far right views, and lastly because in the political history of my country being blindly pro-Russia contributed to the death of our communist party (by crumbling the confidence of its members and the trust of their voters), which was one of the biggest and beneficial party we’ve ever had (not like Russia is to blame in this case though).
Wanting people to have housing, healthcare, and food is a pathway to many philosophies some consider to be… unnatural.
Hexbear is explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-liberal. We’re a bunch of Marxists and anarchists, and we aren’t apologetic about it. That’s the crux of the matter, really, those who oppose communism tend to oppose Hexbear.
A lot of the hate against Hexbear relies on deliberate misinterpretation, but a lot of it is as simple as the anti-Hexbear crowd being right-wing. There’s also the “leftists” that oppose Hexbear because of a lack of correct understanding of theory and leftist history. There are also the people that don’t vibe with Hexbear’s more shitposty vibes.
If you consider yourself a Marxist or an anarchist, there’s a good chance you’ll fit in! If not, and you’re interested in learning about Marxism or anarchism, then you’ll also fit in! Welcome!
Thanks and yes, I surely don’t belong elsewhere :)
Hexbear existed pre-federation as its own little isolated forum that developed a relatively-active userbase with relatively shared ideals. When federation came around, Hexbear was different enough that we couldn’t enable it right away and it took much effort from the dev team here to “unfork” us. When federation was finally enabled, our culture clashed with other instances in several major ways:
- emojis were bugged and were enormous when viewed on any other instance
- our high activity and commonality of opinion made other instances think we were constantly botting or “brigading” (its legacy has been preserved in emoji form:
), when in reality it was simply our users posting as they always have
- we have a whitelist of instances, and the mod team demands compliance with certain standards. Of particular note due to the current internet culture, for an instance to remain federated with us, they must not be willing to tolerate transphobia by their own userbase. This is a bar that most instances fail to pass.
- we really hate Biden, Harris, and the democrats more broadly for various valid reasons (currently the hot button topic is tem carrying out a genocide in occupied Palestine), and libs really hate to hear how the “good guys” are themselves monsters, or seeing “Death to America” regularly.
its own little isolated forum
Well, biggest Lemmy* instance at the time by a big amount.
Yeah, this matches my experience as a lemmy.ml onlooker. People in the federated instances were mostly used to more diplomatic answers from the .ml socialists, or at worst one of the three tactless accounts of the mostly-fine Lemmygrad crowd, then bam, suddenly they could barely make a liberal take without ten Hexbears telling them off, and inevitably a few just badposting or PPB like they would to a liberal tourist trying to set up camp on hexbear.net. These rudeposts were a small percent but the scale of Hexbear accounts and the sudden arrival made people notice, cry “Russian Bots”, all that stuff. To go from one or two accounts making political rants to an oversized PPB in reply to a “normal” post is a big jump for a community, Hexbear was considered a malicious troll instance by many. (citation: the site taglines)
emojis were bugged and were enormous when viewed on any other instance
this was hilarious though
The biggest poops on the biggest balls
∞ 🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, ze/hir, des/pair, none/use name, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish0·12 days agoYou can still do it. If you remove “emoji” from the title it becomes big again.
∞ 🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, ze/hir, des/pair, none/use name, undecided]@hexbear.netEnglish0·12 days agoIt doesn’t work on hexbear (at least yet, once we upgrade to the correct lemmy-ui version it should), but it does on other instances
it’s so big lmao
For you
That’s an incredible amount of power to drop here
The short answer is that we don’t typically buy the western backed narratives about the world, and instead choose to actually look at reality and decide for ourselves how the world is.
This is extremely disruptive to people who just read what the CIA says and go “yeah that’s objective truth!” and so rather than live with that discomfort or learn from our more diverse worldview, they would rather block us.
Propaganda is a hell of a drug. Welcome though, I hope you have a nice time here
You have to keep in mind that many of those users haven’t interacted with Hexbear at all, especially not the ones on lemmy.world since they defederated pre-emptively as a last resort, so what they know about us is some second hand purple monkey dishwasher bullshit. I’ve seen some truly baffling takes like that we’re just pretending to be inclusive to trans people.
“defederating pre-emptively as a last resort” remains one of the funniest sentiments ever seriously shared on Lemmy.
Yeah it couldn’t believe what I read when I saw those exact words from lemmy.world own post 💀
What blew my mind even more was the quote from an Hexbear announcement that they used as justification : it was only telling Hexbear users to be nice which made absolutly no sense.
so_far.png
Wouldn’t that be a first resort?
Thats what made it so funny, they claimed they defederate “only as a last resort” but then saw no choice but to do it “pre-emptively”.
Last two paragraphs here: https://lemmy.world/post/2498330
people (admins? can’t remember) on world have actually said that hexbear users are pretending to be trans in order to get away with our envelope-pushing takes or whatever
The sjw instance admin straight up told me that China and Russia are “pushing the trans issue” to radicalize people against the US, so that tracks.
Ah yes, Transition with chinese characteristics
I’ve had several people on other instances decide I’m not really trans and just faking it because I’m an evil tankie. It’s probably the biggest reason I stopped posting outside of Hexbear. I hate to admit it since I know it’s exactly what that type wants to hear, but it really did upset me when I would spend a significant amount of time replying to someone and trying to engage in good faith, and they would immediately dismiss me because their asshole liberal trans friend disagrees with me and obviously they speak for all of us.
This is an extremely common .world take. Sadly pretty standard level in terms of their rampant queerphobia.
Half of it is transphobia and queerphobia and half of it is liberals seething about us being further left than them
gotta love “allies” that save their homophobia/transphobia for people they disagree with.
Look at the the reaction people had when Caitlin Jenner turned up to have shitty opinions. Immediately everyone started misgendering her, mocking her transition, claiming she wasn’t actually Trans…
I see you’ve met my mother.
The ocean of “lol trump and Putin are gay with each other” every time any RussiaGate news came out
I fucking hate that so hard. If you think they’re petty weak men then just say that, draw your propaganda or whatever. If you draw them in drag you’re showing what you really think about gay men.
But nah, when you’re le epic owning your political oponents it’s fine to use homophobia :| I sure do feel included by the liberal establishment. Defs not just feeling like a tolerated pet freak.
It’s like that Karen stuff just being mask off misogyny but it’s ok because sometimes a woman is completely horrible and now we can all vent about how much we really hate women who dare to be loud and abrasive.
Homophobia, fatphobia, penis size shaming, ageism, ableism…
Just a list of the things I’ve seen liberals employ when talking about Trump this week alone.
sigh
Yeah…she laughs her ass off at those, too.
every single time I see one of their posts complaining about getting banned from here I check the modlog and it’s always something transphobic or racist
A lot of people from the internet that live in Western Europe or especially the US are told a lot of lies about China, North Korea, Cuba, the USSR, etc. The gist of the lying is that they are told these countries are authoritarian, and that makes them more fascist than the US.
They are also told that modern Russia is the same as the USSR and they are still Communists. (Read: authoritarian, fascist)
Since hexbear is pro China, pro USSR, when I bring up the fact that I browse hexbear to real people in real life they say, “that’s a dangerous place, it’s filled with Russian government propaganda trolls” with a straight face.
If they believe China/NK/USSR are more fascist than the United States, they can’t understand why someone would openly support them, and their only conclusion is to assume it’s a propaganda troll employed by a foreign government.
Side note: this also applies internally to things like MAGA. It’s a common idea from Democrats in the US to talk about Trump actually being from Russia and an infiltration candidate who is bringing fascism to the United States, not because fascism is inherent to the US political structure, but because Putin told him to.
Anyway, the reason these people hate on hexbear is that they don’t understand why they can see an instance “invading” “real” instances with foreign propaganda agents and no one will “fix” it for them.
Wait people in real life know about this place?
The only people I’ve known IRL that know about this place are the people I introduced to it. I would gag if some random said “Hexbear”
Just refer to it as Gexbear to throw them off
Calling it Shrekland.net
Not a lot, but people who are technologically literate enough to be aware of the fediverse will know about hexbear
when I bring up the fact that I browse hexbear to real people in real life
they say, “that’s a dangerous place, it’s filled with Russian government propaganda trolls” with a straight face.
People IRL know about hexbear?
I know of one IRL person who when I obliquely referred to HB in a convo they knew what I was talking about, but that’s it and I like it that way.
yeah i always chat about hexbear with the other agents in the breakroom
Liberal im-poster syndrome exasperated by the fact that we have a culture of pushing back with replies due too getting rid of downvoting years ago.
They hate us because we have the most intelligent, powerful, and beautiful posters. Like you!
Welcome!!
They hate us cuz they ain’t us.