I figured since their admin has asked them to stop participating over here it may be worthwhile to get a new discussion going that is primarily blahaj. I'm almost certain they'll still be upvoting so keep that in mind as that may skew things. Worthwhile to check in from instances that have already defederated them. The previous thread definitely left a bad taste in my mouth but what do y'all think?
Old thread can be found here
EDIT: With regards to the post on new federation guidelines here: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
The current top comment is:
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
First comment for me, but I've been a blahaj member since the migration. When I learned about hexbear, I was really excited because I lurked r/cth back in the day and always liked their content a lot. I'm a GenX queer anarcho-syndicalist who is terminally irony poisoned and moderately online, so it's basically my people.
So I spent a bit of time looking at what they've built over the last 3 years and it was impressive. The reasons behind the mandatory pronouns are fantastic. As a cis person (sorry), whenever I specify my pronouns, it's an attempt to normalize specifying them so that it isn't just for trans people. That's why they added them in hexbear, and when they did that, it outed a whole bunch of transphobes and shitty people, who were then removed from the instance. Sounds like good praxis to me. Seeing cynical interpretations of that sucks.
They also don't allow downvoting, same as us, for many of the same reasons.
What we're seeing right now is a culture shock because they've only been loose in the fediverse for a week, and the folx over at hexbear are having a struggle session about it. They've been in a bubble for a while and they seem to know it They didn't know their emojis were so big, they're working out guidelines for engagement, they're trying to rein in the users who are getting too aggressive (including admins and mods DMing people).
It would be really cool if we at least gave them a couple more weeks to get the hang of things. Their communities are easy to block and the instance as a whole is very value aligned with blahaj. Queer and leftist unity is important.
Being harassed and called a lib for criticizing their dogpiling doesn't feel like unity to me.
Not minimizing that at all, a lot of that wasn't cool, but it was a handful of users from a very large instance, so it wasn't necessarily the fault of the whole instance. They're having internal arguments about that last thread, and many of them feel gross about it (notice they aren't here this time). They're also gonna have some new users who are too eager to dunk on libs to think about it for 5 seconds - a human problem, not an instance one.
Editing to add this link https://hexbear.net/post/353633 Wherein hexbear tells us all their universal safe word, and links to their code of conduct.
Safewords are agreed by participants ahead of time, happening to know their magic word isn't the same thing.
There's a big difference between not bowing to respectability politics and respecting the culture of other instances.
I'd be willing to see if they improve but they've got a fair bit to make up for after that last thread.