~500 comments about our instance and admins in the past week. Talk about needing to touch some grass...
What do you expect? There's a reason everyone who has a desire to maintain their sanity has defederated from them.
There's some good peeps there and they help in keeping the crypto-fash in check. But their clannishness is unchecked.
Do we really need their help keeping fascists in check? Problem is hexbears consider everyone who's not on ml or hexbear to be an ipso facto fascist, and act accordingly. There's zero room in their ideology for anyone with more moderate political views. I'd say the majority of our users are probably left leaning, but unless they happen to want the violent destruction of the western liberal democracies, then they just aren't left enough for hexbears to accept.
Having said all that, I feel like we've managed to successfully remove most of the overt political trolling from hexbear on our instance lately, so our own communities aren't too affected. But they really hate the fact we've been clamping down on them.
I'll also acknowledge the majority of hexbear's users don't go trolling. They seem to have a bunch of well meaning people who are focussed on community building, a bunch of political history/theory enthusiasts, and a bunch of awful trolls who are just there for the lulz. You can see in their own modlogs that there's tensions within their instance between those groups.
So, it's a complicated situation to deal with, and depending which groups you interact with, you might have a very different experience. From my own experience I'd say the bad far outweighs the good though.
I think it's because you and me face the brunt of their ire for trying to defend our instance inside their toxic comms, and that colors our perspective. But I try to step out of this and see things less personally when it affects more than just me. Just my take. I generally appreciate having the chance to be challenged from the left on occasion. None of us is perfect at the end of the day.
but unless they happen to want the violent destruction of the western liberal democracies
Btw, I think we also need to be cognizant when they exaggerate, but then again, a lot of their users will be the first to say "Lol, they think we exaggerate" so it's not always clear since they're too many levels deep in irony, which has it's own impact on their userbase's mentality. Similar statements generally require discussion and deconstruction before one can decide if that person deserves some sort of sanction.
I think we just need to take what they say at face value, because it's all to easy for problematic users to pivot to "just joking" when they get called out.
they help in keeping the crypto-fash in check
Unless your users at large are crypto fascists I don't think you need crypto authoritarians to keep crypto fascists in check.
Well their criticism of the current system is on-point, and they can help counter pro-capitalism ideologues. It's just that their praxis tends to be shite when they try to be all "vanguard of the proletariat" or overuse their "bullying" as a tactic.
they can help counter pro-capitalism ideologues
Only with authoritarian ideals, and while supporting places like China and N. Korea, giving capitalists every reason to mock what the tankies falsely present as communism.
Like, you do you, but personally simply having anti-capitalism in common isn't enough to overlook the oppressive ideas they preach and support (even if indirectly, by using that instance specifically, they actively endorse and condone those ideals), just like having anti-stateism in common isn't enough to overlook the oppressive ideas "an"caps preach and support.
They're telling you who they are, the best thing you can do is listen (and if any of these users really are that chill and not at all tankies like you give them credit for, they should understand why being affiliated with authoritarians is a red flag to most users, and have no problem creating an account on another instance that isn't bringing mass defederation on to itself by brigading and harassing anyone who doesn't agree with their oppressive views)
Hexbear and lemmygrad are the only instances I blocked in-client, and it was a drastic instant improvement.
Hey db0 and mods!
Since you're just humans and we never know if the insults are slowly getting to you or you're just having doubts, I want to give a voice to the lurkers in here and reiterate one thing: I feel exceptionally well taken care of in this instance! I'm extremely happy to be a part of it, I don't even know what a downtime is and I don't see much drama or toxicity if any at all. I'm simply loving Lemmy (yes, seriously!), I'm loving my time on it and I can just focus on following the communities I'm passionate in, which is the main point of Lemmy. I'm also aware that this does not happen without considerable hard work from the people behind it. So while I'm sure most of it goes unnoticed, I hope to at least convey with this that it's not taken for granted or unappreciated in the slightest bit. A very big thanks to you all (and I try to donate where I can) <3
As for my personal experience, whenever a hexbear post makes it into my feed it's mostly an overly aggressive political take or straight up trolling. It reminds me of the League of Legends kind of humour: It's supposed to be a joke, but it's not explicitly spelled out that it's a joke and it attacks the individual. It's a mix of aggressive trolling and just straight up toxicity. You just never know if you're supposed to take it serious or not. But I personally like to have a choice if I eventually want to block them or not, and I feel like having a choice is one of the common threads between FOSS, Linux, the fediverse, self-hosting, piracy and so on.
But, while I do appreciate this, it isn't crucial to my experience on Lemmy. So, if at any time this balance is taking too much of a toll on you guys, it wouldn't be a big deal for me if we would "lose contact" with hexbear. Last thing I want is to slowly cook your sanity bit by bit, with each passing day a bit more, over something that is frankly not that important. I'd rather prefer you focus on what you love doing, be that doing technical stuff, improving the instance, memeing around, learning new stuff or simply discussing things with other people in peace. Life is much too short to argue with people, and over the internet it's even worse!
Hey matey. Your comment is much appreciated! Thanks for taking the time.
Oh so I'm not the only one. The users on Hexbear are always angry for some reason.
That's because it's a toxic community
Not from what I've seen, it's just not tolerant of liberalism.
Not from what I've seen, it's just not tolerant ~~of liberalism.~~
There, I fixed it for you.
Not in my experience, they are very tolerant towards Marxists, Anarchists, trans people, etc. Liberalism is bannable, though.
Well yes they just label anyone who they want to be removed a "liberal", like they did with me.
I believed that, myself, for quite some time. I ended up blocking them, however, despite being an anarcho-syndicalist. The instance has very much cultivated a toxic and anti-social culture where the most active users are climbing over eachother for a chance to "dunk" on someone.
Just like right-wingers abuse outrage to get a rush some of the polygonimals clearly have become addicted to aggressive behaviors, with the rush from bullying and dunking being rather apparently more important than leftism. It's a problem.
Additionally, their claims of anti-sectarianism and dialectics do not hold water when they are quick to label dissenting leftists as libs so that they can justify bans for those who don't toe the line.
Hey I remember when I got temp sitebanned from db0 for getting too spicy about trans rights in some transphobic .world or shitjustworks thread, as much as I don't like tankies they seem to be correct about this instance also having shit politics in some ways. Yet I'm still here because I'd like to think broadly as leftists we all agree on more things than we disagree on.
How about instead we all chill on the infighting and all touch some grass and stay out of each other's way?
Drama like this is exactly why I laugh when people say its better on lemmy than reddit, its just a different flavor of the same shit when you're on All.
It's honestly sad, almost to the point where defederating from them would be better
But I'm sure we'd be loosing good people from hexbear too
Eh, I don't plan on defederating over such drama. They see some value in some of our users and we see some value in some of their users and we can ban the red-fash apologists and disinfo peddlers if they become a problem.
I've never had a positive interaction with anyone on that instance.
I've had, but it's mostly outside of their areas, or with people who are not immediately closing ranks and arguing in bad faith. Just before I got banned I had someone praise me for being chill, so 🤷
I had to join a defederated server after the mods sent hexbear users my way to harass he after a I reported users for harassment....
As someone no longer part of their drama, yall should defederate.
Also the Lemmy.ml admins when you call Hexbear accounts tankies
Or lemmy.ml mods when you say something mildly critical of China or Russia.
to be honest: hexbear is an awful instance, and to me absolutely nothing would be lost if we just defederated from them. they are a constant source of drama, are awfully quick with the banhammer if they get criticized, and have cultivated an echo chamber that makes any meaningful discussions with them impossible. comparing them to lemmygrad is more than valid, and noone bats an eye when someone defederates from that cesspool.
i'm really for keeping as many doors as possible open, but the big question is if we really want the door open to an openly authoritarian and for the most part radicalized community. looking at the comments here, i can see that i am not the only one who thinks this way.
It's funny how butthurt they always get about the simplest shit. It's kinda hilarious.
Their instance has always been blocked on my end since the second lemmy added the instance block feature, but since that only gets rid of posts, my individual user block list has grown to about 40 hb users by now. Life gets better every time I add one to it. I hopped over there for a second and saw them gloating about banning you from their instance like it was some huge win. And then shitting on db0 because they're "not real pirates" because they.... don't support dictatorships or something? Lol wtf?
Do not ever try to reason with them because you are burning your breath. I am surprised you have tolerated them this long. Quite literally, the only thing that can ever be done with hardcore radical trolls is blocking or defederating. Removing their voice always hurts them the most, because their only source of energy is controversy.
I think the rest of us reasonable folk really love what you do here db0. This has been by far the most stable, cleanest instance I've been on so far, and i've tried 3 or 4 of them. don't let the assholes try and pull you down for not kowtowing to their weird ideology. Keep it up!
Edit: And as expected, the downvote brigade is monitoring this post, lol.
Ah here we go, grab your pop-corn and head over to thread #7 :D
The first comment is about you harassing them in dms now you're doing a call out post because they banned you for harassment?
Isn't that kind of proving their point?
I think everyone who hates hexbear should just.... Make a hexbear.net account and go hang out there. That's what i did, waaaay back when sh.itjust.works defedded. I hadn't heard about them before and i just had to see what the food was about first-hand.
It's not the den of wolves people seem to fear. In fact, i spend nearly as much time hanging out in their threads as on this instance. I have always liked learning new perspectives and stuff, and i believe I've gained quite a bit from making that place one of my innanet homes
I'm on an instance federated with them, and subscribed to a couple of their comms, but their most popular politics boards are exactly what you'd expect from it being where r/chapoTrapHouse went.
100% agree. Largely, defederation from Hexbear by the larger servers has resulted in a sort of vastly inflated mythology surrounding it.
Just visit it, and see for yourself what it's actually like, it won't hurt.
Is this getting brigaded? Lmao the downvotes
Have you read the comments? Plenty of people think this is silly evidently, it's not brigading when a lot of dbz users are hexbear users also
Upvoted comment here:
I don’t care for the drama on Hexbear. And I don’t care for it here either. This post is drama baiting.
That's a reasonable sentiment to me
I think a lot of our users on dbzero are genuinely confused why our admin keeps posting about this, ngl. They're also talking smack on their Matrix channel for some reason despite saying that they think more about us than vice-versa.
It honestly looks like he wants/likes the drama to me.
Wait what do you you mean "keeps posting"? This is the only thing I've posted about hexbear for months!
I'm glad that v19 of Lemmy introduced user-facing instance block settings. Just block hexbear and move on.
I don't care for the drama on Hexbear. And I don't care for it here either. This post is drama baiting.
I don't see them. I've blocked them all several months ago. Thankfully.
I've blocked, like, 5 HexBear users and then haven't seen a single shitty post or comment from that instance since. Either they are all banned from the other instances/communities, or it's really only 5 dickheads.
Maybe stop being so cringe and acting like a baby
I was born in cringe. Molded by it...
Meta community. Discuss about this lemmy instance or lemmy in general.