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.
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.