So I was just looking through literature.cafe a bit, and came across this excellent comment chain by Janvier. It outlines the history and culture of Hexbear, and makes a very solid argument for defederating them.

TL;DR- Don't defederate Hexbear because they're a bunch of genocide-apologist authoritarians. Defederate them because they're annoying, and will burn out your moderators.

Sucks for you guys. They caused nothing but trouble when they were still federated with Blahaj.

After so many of us complained about how they were being dicks and many on the instance weren't feeling comfortable, hexbear decided to defederate from us first since they somehow said it wasn't safe for their LGBT members to be on it.

Funny enough a few days later a new account started posting across different lemmy instances for days about how the Blahaj instance was anti trans and that the admin was too. Our Admin is openly trans :/

The whole argument started because the user said everything had to be political and wouldn't stop insulting others who said they didn't want to have every post on Blahaj to turn political.

It was just too perfect timing how a few days after hexbear defedarated for somehow saying the pro LGBT instance was anti-LGBT, that we got a brand new account attacking trans members while sayin they were anti-trans.

Enjoy your new people.

I don't mind the general hexbear ideology in itself. Sure. You do you.

But, damn, I see more than a few of its members just being obnoxious.

Opinion of one of the admins regarding hexbear, just so you guys know where they stand:

In my view, the hexbear community is actually a positive force on this platform. They are frequently abrasive, but they ultimately have the potential to contribute to what we are building here. They are extremely active and some of them are quite intelligent. But they've also become accustomed to a privileged position on their own walled-in platform, and they need to be reminded that their views are considered ver extreme by the average person.

Pretty disappointing that @iamaqtpie is active on hexbear and says things like:

Please direct any seething that you may wish to do to the struggle session that’s well underway over here.

which reddit considered hate speech 🙄

Also disappointing that hexbear gets to vote federation, while we are left to federate to hexbear without a choice because the admins like the instance. Lame.

It's clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it's decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn't this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn't mean anything?

Lol I blocked the most annoying posters from hexbear on this thread and now there's hardly any comments. I think we should put them in time out. Like defederate for 15 days. if they keep brigading, another 15 days. I don't really want to defederate, but I hate this kind of brigading.

This is such bullshit. Just saw the announcement that we aren't going to defederate from hexbear. Why weren't we given a say in this?

They added us to their whitelist.

What the actual fuck is wrong with admins of SJW?

Please direct any seething that you may wish to do to the struggle session that's well underway over here.

Thought this instance puts things to vote so yeah, duck you too, goodbye.

They're abrasive enough that they couldn't even get along with lemmy.blahaj.zone, a dedicated LGBT friendly instance ran by several trans women, out of accusations of said admins being transphobic

OK, first time I've seen the dread Hexbear brigading in action. So, thanks, I guess?

Now I understand why they warrant defederation. I'm glad on on a Lemmy instance that defederated them, and suppose I'l have to find a kbin instance that does as well (apparently this one doesn't defederate them if I'm reading this correctly?)

The irony is that, although I've been in the fediverse a while, today I literally made my first kbin account.

What the hell is hexbear? This is like the 3rd time I've seen it mentioned today

Is there a straightforward way to go through and block all communities on hexbear? I browse All but would like to avoid accidentally commenting on any of their posts.

Calling this present thread a "struggle session" is dismissive at best if not downright insulting and I expect better from our mod team.

I appear to be out of the loop. What's wrong with hexbear? I'm not familiar with the instance.