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’ve had two major issues with these guys. While not necessarily worth defederating everyone, I really don’t want to deal with hexbear because:

    1. ALL of their content is political. When they first showed up on my feed, I watched what posts/communities came up and how their users interacted on non hexbear posts. I’ve done my best to remove all politics from my social media. These guys only talked about politics and would go to other communities to turn a normal conversation political.
    2. Everything was extreme and obnoxious. I don’t understand why everyone keeps calling them polite. There was a constant “you’re with us or you’re against us”/“my beliefs are always right” behavior that was really annoying, especially in a public space that wasn’t polarized before they got there. It reminded me of this one girl from middle school who would walk into a room and loudly talk about whatever she wanted until all the other conversations petered out.

    They’re more than welcome to behave like that in their home, but they can’t go to a public space and expect everyone to cater to their beliefs.

    • Not a part of blahaj, but the impression I’ve gotten from what I’ve seen (primarily in the lemm.ee megathread) is that for better or worse hexbear takes the concept of radical transparency and debate to its fullest extreme. For the better, it can produce some intensely thought provoking discussions–I’ve had to reevaluate and reconsider my own personal ethics more in the past week or so than I have in the past few years.

      But the downside is that it’s Just. So. Exhausting. I fully agree that everything they discuss has a political undertone to it in some way. It feels like they just cannot turn off, and I always have to be on my guard when they get involved in any discussion, even if it’s nominally about a completely non-political topic. Even when they’re making high effort posts instead of spamming emojis and pig poop balls, every discussion feels like a minefield, where the slightest misstep gets you punished with a “here’s a response that implies/outright states you’re woefully misinformed at best and a protofascist nazi at worst, here’s a link to an obscure book written by a communist scholar 50 years ago that you should read before even trying to discuss this topic.” Hexbear getting involved in a discussion is the discourse equivalent of a group playing 4-player FFA Smash Bros. with items on and someone rolls up and demands 1v1, no items, tournament ruleset only.

      I feel like I just cannot relax when hexbear is active in a discussion, and it’s not even like I really disagree with their points–yes, the US is too powerful, yes, capitalism is bad–but I strongly disagree with their conclusions (supporting China and Russia because it weakens the US is the equivalent of voting for Trump because Biden/Hillary isn’t liberal enough.) It’s just that they are so laser-focused on debate and so ready to believe the worst in everyone (they called using “top kek” a holocaust denier dogwhistle FFS, that shit originated from freaking world of warcraft, and was popularized on 4chan back when it was just a shithole instead of a racist shithole! I occasionally use it because I’m an elder millennial and I like making dated references!) that even if you support their overall goals and philosophy, you still walk away mentally exhausted because of how carefully you had to parse your words to avoid stepping on a landmine.

    • Not entirely true, before the defederation I browsed their communities and I’ve seen casual threads about manga, recovery from Alcoholism, talking about insects… and everyone was polite there.

      It’s just that when it comes to politics they get EXTREMELY loud, and everything else is drown out.

      • Honestly, where I’ve seen the flooding of politics is outside of their own communities. Their instance is already an echo chamber, so there’s no need to spread propaganda. But as soon as they venture to other instances, they need to make sure everyone knows how they feel, and if you disagree or just don’t want to talk about it, they instantly turn to personal attacks

      • …what? I think we are in two very different corners of the internet. I follow animal groups, hobbies, work related stuff, and art. None of that should have people screaming about politicians or voting or laws or anything related to politics. I can get all of that from informed sources like AP or Reuters, and when I’m done with the news for the day I’m done. My social media feeds have zero politics, which is why I didn’t like hexbear users - they were injecting politics into my non political spaces.

        I’ll vote when I can and protest when I can, but I don’t want to doomscroll through a bunch of angry people when interacting with them has no personal or social benefit.

        • Animal groups, hobbies, work, and art are political. Art is the best example: artists are often said to hold a mirror up to society. Work’s conditions are dictated by the conditions of capitalism and the entire act of work is an endeavour in practicing capitalism under the direction of a boss who can control you at the office. Animal rights issues are also obviously political, and hobbies is a really vague umbrella term but there’s a whole lot of politics under that umbrella.

          Politics is defined by nearly all dictionaries as the field concerning power and decision making in groups. Everything relates to that. I don’t understand what these “non-political” spaces you’re talking about are like. Do you mean being alone? Because if you’re not in a group, then you’re right there wouldn’t be any participation in group decision making. Is that what you mean? That you like your solitude?

          •  Ada   ( @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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            1 year ago

            You’re talking about an ideal, a theoretical idea of what politics is.

            Abigail is talking about her ability to use social media without being drowned out by transphobia and other awful events.

            It’s not 100% achievable, but we can work towards the experience we want. Abigail has made her preferences clear, and this space exists specifically for that reason. There will be no “what aboutism” or “just asking questions” style of transphobia. Anything like that gets banned/blocked immediately. Shitty stuff happens, everyone in this discussion is aware of it. We do our best to make sure those conversations are opt in instead of opt out though.

            Everything is influenced by politics, but not every discussion is about those politics. So no, in this space, not everything is political, except in an abstract sense.

            If you’re looking for a different experience to that, you may struggle with the moderation policies of this instance.

            • I’m trans and I’ve spent my whole life being told my gender is political. I believe that.

              I’m gay and I’ve been told me whole life my sexuality is political. I believe that.

              I’m pagan and since I became religious, I’ve been told that’s political. I believe that.

              I’m neurodivergent and I’ve been told asking to not be the victim of hate speech is political. I believe that.

              Patriarchal society says everything good and decent in my life is political. I believe that. Everything good is political, and politics is awesome.

              My whole life people who talk like Abigail have told me that apoliticism means they get to be transphobic. Homophobic. Sexist. Neuronormative. Ableist. Religiously intolerant.

              I don’t want people to talk like Abigail anymore. People who talk like that are mean. I want a safe space with lots of politics and trans people and gays and pagans and NDs and disabled people.

              • What are my options here? I could act like Abigail. I could use the language of my oppressor and say I hate politics, and redefine politics into whatever I don’t like. I could implicitly accept the control of the ruling class and use their words to try and defend myself and the rest of the trans community. I could try to make my identity palatable to capitalism. “I’m not political, I promise. I won’t disrupt the status quo”

                Or I could say screw that, I’m political and I’m proud. I could reject the premise of the game that capital plays with my life. I could say the things they’re doing are wrong, and I won’t participate. I could use words as I see fit, and use them to protect myself and the community. I could construct a worldview that makes sense and doesn’t oppress anyone.

                And that worldview says: everyone loves politics. You’re human beings, and that’s a political identity.

                lemmy.blahaj.zone/u/ada

                •  Ada   ( @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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                  131 year ago

                  You can be an advocate, you can be visible and loud and queer. But what you can’t do is insist that everyone else has to do the same.

                  I’m like you in that I’m openly, loudly and proudly trans and queer. I do advocacy work, community building, public speaking, I’ve done queer community radio and will likely do so again in the future.

                  But for my own mental health, I sometimes need spaces where my life isn’t that. Where I can browse and engage and talk about stuff in a light hearted way, without having my guard up all the time.

                  What I would suggest is that you take it to cis people, and you take it to gender diverse folk who are looking for those discussions. What you shouldn’t be doing though is pushing politics on trans folk who, like you, have to navigate the reality of anti trans politics already in their daily life. Give them space to recover spoons and exist without the doomscrolling.

          • My dude, no. You completely twisted around my words and made a strawman. And your comment proves my point - this is exactly the type of behavior I was seeing from hexbear users. Following a community where people post pictures of their pets has nothing to do with animal rights/activism. I do not want to talk about animal rights, I want to see cute puppy pics and talk about how cute said puppy is. Ditto for all of your other slippery slope arguments.

            All groups are inherently political? Please touch grass.

          • 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”.

  • Reminds me of the often-told story of the punk bar bartender and nazis

    based on @iamragesparkle;s tweets

    I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

    And the dude next to me says, “hey i’m not doing anything, i’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “out. now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed

    Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “you didn’t see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”

    And i was like, oh,ok and he continues.

    "you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

    And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

    And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”

    And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.

  • I have been so glad that Sync allows instance blocking at a client level. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but after seeing 4 posts from their instance that were just in bad faith “but it’s a joke”. I went ahead and filtered them and luckily haven’t had to see it.

  • Fuck hexbear. I don’t know if they just didn’t try to federate with pawb.social or if they got preemptively blocked (or maybe they went, “ew furries” and nothing of value was lost), but I’m very glad they aren’t federated here. It means I only get exposed to them via comments, and the ones I tend to see don’t shine a good light on the community, especially when they brigade instance meta posts.

      • Sync also has instance blocking feature. Though it’s not perfect since it only blocks posts, you can still see comments from filtered instances. Hopefully it will improve in future

        • Originally I thought this was a good thing, but my opinion quickly shifted after seeing a lot of non-hexbear posts getting a lot of hexbear spam instead of healthy discussions like I was expecting

  •  Rhabuko   ( @Rhabuko@feddit.de ) 
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    341 year ago

    My best wishes to the Admins, the whole thing must have been exhausting and depressing. I purposefully stayed out of the entire discussion since I’m not a member of Blahaj. I think it’s for the better, because I have read a lot in hexbear and the people there are absolute toxic and unhinged. The mentioned Lemm.ee thread was absolutely swarmed with people from hexbear. Like, 3/4 of the comments must have been them. Anyway, wish you all the best.

    • Is that why I haven’t heard of them before? I switch between Beehaw and Programming.dev and I just noticed them everywhere on the latter

      Politics aside, I find their comments to be callous, elitist, and rude. And I heard “a few bad apples” arguments but honestly it doesn’t seem to be a few. All of their posts in my feed are aggressive. And have huge “look what this idiot dolt said before I owned him” energy

      If admins aren’t willing to defederate then I’m happy Sync has an instance-wide block

      • I think the best part about the “a few bad apples” stuff is most of the people using it as a defense leave off the latter half.

        A few bad apples spoil the bunch.

        Yeah it seemed like there may have been a few bad ones from Hexbear, but they never received push back from any other Hexbear users.

        I hope Jerboa adds instance wide blocking in the future, that sounds pretty nice. But I wonder how Sync does it under the hood.

        • That’s a good point and it poses an interesting dilemma.

          If a community chooses to not defederate, then their users will find their comments utterly unavoidable. Either userd will have to accept that or, best case scenario, have gaps in comment threads everywhere where their comments are being filtered out

          • have gaps in comment threads everywhere

            I noticed a lot of comment threads today under politics posts that had large gaps. I figured it was just one or two hexbear tankies I had already blocked being terminally online or something. Turns out they defederated from us entirely and that’s why I couldn’t see them.

            The difference in comment sections is night and day. I’m so happy they’re gone.

  •  Cyrus Draegur   ( @Draegur@lemm.ee ) 
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    1 year ago

    I like hexbear, but i suppose it comes down to a rather … “abnormal” type of “liking”.

    There is definitely a pattern of asshole behavior from hexbear users, but they’re fun to verbally spar with and they make Lemmy feel lively.

    In the same way that capsaicin causes spicy food to be spicy by stimulating nerves that are intended to warn us of pain and injury while in fact it’s actually harmless, I find hexbear’s vociferous users to be endearingly abrasive.

    Because turnabout is fair play, they’re fair game to be rude to. By choosing to interact in a hostile nature, they are consenting to receive hostility. It’s only fair. If they can’t handle it, then they shouldn’t be dishing it out. However, the exchange must be proportional and bigotry can not be allowed.

    “Tankie” is not a slur any more than “Lib” is. If they honestly believe that it’s socially acceptable to use “Lib” as an insult, then it’s sheer hypocrisy to object to “Tankie”. But all other known slurs, ableist slurs, sexist slurs, racial and ethnic slurs, are out of bounds and should be reported, and offenders ignored.

    If they don’t like this arrangement, then they have no business acting like they do outside of their instance and defederation may in fact be necessary.

    • This is a healthy and reasonable take. Its 100% a design feature to change instances if you find one that aligns better with your preferences.

      Once you can pivot all your account preferences with a built in tool, along with instance blocking at a user level, I think lemmy is going be in a fantastic place.

    • I don’t think anti-defederation is a bad sentiment. Defederating is something that should be taken very seriously because it affects everyone in that instance. If it were up to me Hexbear would be defederated but Lemm.ee has users who, for whatever reason, want content from Hexbear. It wouldn’t be fair for them to lose access just because I personally don’t like them. Considering the functionality for users to block instances is already in the works I don’t think defederating is necessary. It’s annoying but I can suffer Hexbear a while longer until I can personally block the instance. I have them blocked in Connect for Lemmy so I already have the option to ignore them.

  •  NaN   ( @nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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    1 year ago

    It didn’t help that the initial user thread about defederation, opened by someone who didn’t like their communities showing up in the All feed as if that is anything but expected, compared them to The_Donald right off the bat (and then remained one of the most vocal and prolific posters on this subject ever since). Prior to that opening salvo, their involvement here had been about 0% and primed the fuse for escalation.

    But yeah, poor us.

    I don’t even particularly like them, but the response over here had plenty of bad faith “she turned me into a newt!” vibes that were pretty uncool, especially from a few flame-stokers including that initial poster, and another who posted the same screenshot a half dozen times to represent what all of “them” think. It’s interesting to watch in real time how easy it is to decide who “they” are and what “they” think versus what “we” think, especially from a real-life community that often suffers gross generalization about what “they” are like when any individual member acts badly in larger society.

    • This whole thing made me sad, because I feel like I’ve seen the worst of our community yet. I feel like there was a ton of toxicity and bad faith coming from both instances. I think it’s probably for the best that we’re defederated, because it’s clear that there are fundamental incompatibilities here, but it didn’t have to go this way.