Lots of people who are seeing top-level postings about Hexbear. Net are probably confused about what has been going on and I want to give an SRD-style overview of the whole thing.
Note: As a user of Blahaj.Zone, I am not a neutral party in this and I do not pretend to be. This is how the whole thing has played out from my perspective.

Hexbear. Net is another Lemmy instance that had relatively recently started to federate with Blahaj.Zone and other Lemmy instances. It had previously been known as Chapo.Chat because it began as an instance for fans of the podcast ChapoTrapHouse.
Recently users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) began to complain about the behavior of Hexbear users. The complaints were about rude, obnoxious behavior: Hexbear users calling people “libs” as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin,…
Such behavior was not necessarily forbidden on Blahaj.Zone, but certain sub-Lemmys had their own rules on these subjects.
One of the threads about Hexbear: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1854795?scrollToComments=true

After an ever increasing number of users calling for defederating from Hexbear. Net, Ada (admin of Blahaj.Zone) opened a thread to talk about it. The thread was quickly inundated with Hexbear users, complaining in turn about being called out in this way. Though many of their comments exploited a current bug in the Lemmy code which resulted in emoji’s being embedded as pictures which results in lots of image spam.
Ada responded by removing top-level comments in the thread which were not from Blahaj.Zone’s users, because she wanted to get the feedback of her own community, not from anybody else.
This happened originally in this thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1959801

The discussion on Blahaj.Zone was a back and forth: Lots of people calling for “leftist and queer unity”, others complaining about getting harassed by Hexbear users.

Meanwhile, elsewhere: Lemm.ee, a Lemmy instance operated and managed by someone from Estonia, also opened a discussion about Hexbear - at least partially motivated by the admin’s increasing unease of the rampant denial of soviet atrocities and the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine was also an issue.
Lemm.ee was largely encountering similar problems as Blahaj.Zone, though the Lemme.ee admin admitted that the Hexbear admin was generally responsive to reports and complaints.
The thread on Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536

The thread was also flooded with comments from Hexbear users. The admin of Lemm.ee also responded by hiding most of the comments from Hexbear.
https://mastodon.social/@brooklynman/110911292961470110

Back on Blahaj.Zone, a tangent opens up: A Hexbear user complains about c/196, the new home of Reddit’s r/196 which had relocated to Blahaj.Zone and has been its biggest community ever since. The Hexbear user complains about their comments being removed, comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs. The user posts pictures of the removal notices.
Blahaj.Zone’s admin Ada steps in and intervenes on behalf of the Hexbear user, having a stern word with the c/196 mod responsible for the removal of the comments.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2136643

A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy’s banner, because it contains “fuck tankies²”, arguing that tankies is a slur. The c/196 mod refuses and publishes their message.
[²"Tankies" is a pejorative term for authoritarian socialists in the vein of Stalin and/or Mao.]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1961004

While the discussion if Blahaj.Zone should defederate from Hexbear is still ongoing, the Hexbear admins defederated from Blahaj.Zone without warning from their side, because of…

unaddressed ableist removals from the /c/196 moderators, defense of chasers, no-quarter rules regarding our users, leakage of good-faith DMs from our admin team, and a general lack of initiative to punish these behavior

In her a response to these events, Ada points out in a comment that she never had the chance to adress the ableist incident (she was in bed) while other issues had happened in the past and had been adressed at the time. Thus she could not react before Hexbear defederated.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135406

TL;dr: Blahaj.Zone’s users complain about ill behavior of users on Hexbear. Net. A discussion about defederation begins on Blahaj.Zone. Meanwhile Hexbear users complain about Blahaj.Zone in turn and Hexbear. Net defederates instantly and without warning.

  • I agree with the sentiment on your breakdown, but it’s important to recognize the distinction between the technical definition of politics, and the colloquial one: most people mean partisan, mainstream, and/or heated discussion of government policy that’s highly controversial. If you stretch that colloquial definition just a tiny bit, once any discussion gets contentious, groups start to form, and they start adopting talking points that fall on deaf ears to the other side, that’s when you could get the average person to consider it a “political” subject.

    The person you responded to pretty clearly was operating under the popular meaning of the term. I’ve given people similar spiels to your own, but there’s a thing people mean when they refer to something as political or apolitical, and while there’s theory and textbook definitions to draw upon, there’s also value in getting to the crux what they’re trying to say even if they don’t use important words in the same you do. There should probably be a succinct disambiguation, is it lowercase p politics as in the workplace latter of office politics, or is it the uppercase P Politics where the discussion is over society-level legislation and policies? Ubiquitous politics vs niche politics? Perhaps there’s a book someone wrote on the subject 50 years ago that we can use as gospel on the correct way to refer to these different concepts.

    There’s a certain level of (near) unanimous group cohesion that doesn’t feel political to participate in because everyone present seems to be in agreement to keep the peace. Without a political “other” being formed for each side to mock and deride, disagreements are relegated to personal taste matters that people can just agree to disagree and still allow each other in the same space. I think the key is when people start strategizing how to get more people “on their side”, because one of the goals of political action is to rally other people onto a cause. The dynamic is markedly different, with a shared group purpose with the future at stake.

    There are times when a subject is worth bringing issues to light to spark politics within a “non political” group. To give an example, I’m really glad that the ethics of designer dog breeding has been called into question and heavily criticized, because some really fucked up things have been done to the genomes and resulting quality of life of countless dogs. I’m sure there were plenty of people who bemoaned the Animal Rights Activists coming in and “bringing politics” into the prestigious activity of seeing whose dog with a genetically squashed-in nose could run the farthest despite its impaired respiratory system. In situations of that vein, where harm is being actively done and bringing attention inspires positive change, the naysayers can cry harder and deal with it. I’m not a vegan but I can get behind the cause especially on a policy level to end meat subsidies and even outright ban factory farms.

    But there are plenty of situations where a big-P Political topic doesn’t need to be brought up, especially if it’s almost entirely tangential (and especially if it goes beyond one or two relevant threads under an innocuous post). If there’s an ethical problem, a bad actor, or some other injustice, by all means: speak up. Otherwise, it’s best to respect people just having a chat over a hobby or admiring art; not every comment section needs to be railroaded into the same tired talking points about how everything is degraded under capitalism and the climate is being destroyed (points I’d almost certainly agree with you on, by the way). They have their place and they shouldn’t be pushed aside entirely, but that place isn’t anywhere and everywhere.

    There is value in having spaces where people do not have to be reminded of stressful things; we have enough of those already. The mental health benefits alone to not having 24/7 doom spiral content can’t be overstated.

    At the same time I do think people need to just be okay with ignoring, hiding, or manually filtering out content they don’t want to see, because at the end of the day it will pop up in unexpected places from time to time. There are plenty of ways to do that on Lemmy, I know Sync has some pretty good filtering features for those who want them. I would encourage people to make use of said filters as needed, even if just to improve the overall experience and reduce spam that would show up in their feed.

    • You’re right that when most people say politics, they mean “opinions I disagree with”. But if someone hates hearing differing opinions, they should say that instead of saying they hate politics. And the reason for that is that our belief that politics is disagreement with the status quo is propaganda. The ruling class wants us to hate it when people disagree with the status quo, so they find a name for it and tell us it’s bad.

      I’ve spoken to dozens of people who “hated politics”, and 90% of them couldn’t even define what politics is. Probably because they didn’t want to admit that what they hated is differing opinions. The word politics as it exists in propaganda is a thought terminating cliche. It destroys introspection, critical thinking, and rational decision making.

      The truth is, human beings are given at birth a tremendous love for politics. Humans are a social species, and politics is the building of society. Humans love that shit, they can’t get enough of it. That’s why all the best books and movies are political. That’s why Disney is “woke”. Politics sells because everyone loves it.

      I’m not of the mind to bow down to this thought terminating cliche and let people walk around demanding things with no critical thinking. If someone wants to tell me that politics is bad, they better have thought it through, or I’m going to make a fool of them until they stop making a fool of themselves. They better bring a definition to the table, because I’ve got a definition and it says everyone loves politics. If someone can’t define what they hate, then they obviously have no idea what they’re talking about and I’m not going to go along with their cliche. They’re going to have to explain what they mean and say “I want to stop everyone on the internet from disagreeing with me”.