What in the world have I woken up into...

As an Asian/Taiwanese, I do not understand why Hexbearians feel the need to point out what's racist for us.
The picture of Xi the Pooh is clearly a parody and pointed specifically at Xi and the CCP, and not a general racist insult to Asians. Every, and I mean EVERYONE, in East Asia knows that, including the Chinese themselves. We use/refer to it a lot ourselves on our own social media platforms in Taiwan (習維尼, 習: Xi, and Winnie the Pooh: 維尼), and if you mention any of it on Chinese social media Weibo/WeChat, you likely will get banned from the platform.

Kind of reminds me of cultural appropriation gone out of hand, where Westerners feel the need to be angry at other Westerners for wearing Japanese Kimonos or Chinese Quipaos. Like, no one here is offended. We don't understand why those people feel the need to be angry for us.

Edit: I just saw a Hexbear comment on another thread posting that China doesn't ban Winnie the Pooh because Disney is able to exist. Well, no shit. It's in the context of Disney. Put that phrase in any other thread on their platform (preferably political) and see what happens, then can you claim that the CCP doesn't ban the word Xi the Pooh.

Hexbear: why do so many people want to degenerate with us

Also hexbear: Spams every complaint in other instances with unrelated images

Don't listen to hexbear users when they say they "defend themselves" from homophobia and transphobia. One user thought the admin of Blahaj.zone was being transphobic for not allowing politics in every community. Hexbear users will literally just lie about the repamant amount of homophobia and transphobia to justify their existence here.

I actually just abandoned this instance purely because of hexbears sudden federation here.

They're just a bunch of assholes masquerading as sensible leftists.

I was really sad to leave but I refuse to deal with them.

I made a post like this on my old instance's main community and it got flooded by 400+ hexbear comments telling me how stupid I am. No, the only real solution is to make a new account on an instance that's defederated. Good luck.

Yeah I think it's about time to get that feature. As a user I have preferences that don't necessarily match with the defederation policies of any instance and I would very much like to choose for myself which instances I want to see.

In my case: I'm not interested in polarising, divisive, toxic content and I really don't care if it's coming from the left or from the right. But it seems to me that I have to choose a side, because some instances are blocking the right wing extremism and some blocking the stuff to the left, but not both.

Reading subscribed communities only is not an option, because then I will miss out on new stuff. And blocking all these awful communities in "all" by hand is too much work.

tl;dr not being able to block instances as a user is giving me a bad Lemmy experience

Half of all is hexbear posts for me now and I don’t like those posts very much

I would love to block that trash completely. Every interaction I’ve had with any of them and their posts has just given me the impression they are just trolls and nothing else. If anyone truly thinks they are leftists, I question your definition of left. They can go and stay in their little instance and show all the bullshit and talk all the nonsense they want to.

There is about to be - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3869

It's not political, it's right wing troll factories trying to stir up the real left and make socialism look bad. They're trash.

If an instance doesn't want a negative reputation for doing certain things, they should prioritize not doing those certain things.

If you act like an arse, people are going to think that you're an arse. If you want people to think that you're pleasant, you should try acting pleasant. If someone acts like an arse but expects to be called pleasant, I would think that person is delusional. Too many people are like this, then get upset when people don't want to deal with them.

Frankly, life is too short to deal with certain people. Why would I waste my time and happiness for a troll?

I might block the instance soon. It doesn't seem like I would be losing much at the moment.

Yay, looks like they defederated again.

The Connect app has functionality to block instances. It isn't built directly into Lemmy. I'm not sure if any other apps have implemented it as well.

join an instance like sopuli.xyz that has defederated from them

Yeah, I have blocked hexbear & numerous weird gay/fetish porn communities. Make sure you're logged in. Click on the post & navigate to the community....then...towards the top before all the posts, there's a bunch of options. One being to 'block'. I have to scroll to find it.

Nav to offensive community

Block their ass

It should be noted I use Sync for Lemmy. You may or may not have this on your render/UI. Should be able to block.

With sync for lemmy you can block instances by adding it to the instances filter.

I kind of like it just for the batshit, teenage-level stupid takes but I wouldn't be sad if they went away.