Context

As you probably now, Hexbear is a fairly large leftist instance, whose users are notorious for being very loud in the communities of every instance they federate with. For a long time they blocked all instances, preferring to remain isolated. Recently, however, they have started allowing some large instances into their allow list.

Yesterday they expanded said list by including the popular sh.itjust.works (SJW) instance.

Some Hexbear users immediately jumped on the train by creating posts in !main@sh.itjust.works making sure everyone was aware of their presence and calling out what they thought was bigotry on SJW’s side:

  • Example 1
  • Example 2, the post included in the meme, now removed

Currently, there’s people on both sides calling for mutual defederation, as one Hexbear sees the other party as “bigoted” and “politically illiterate infants” while many people on SJW are just tired of the political spam.

Where do we stand in this mess? Comfortably on the sidelines, enjoying the popcorn while it lasts.

  •  awwwyissss   ( @awwwyissss@lemm.ee ) 
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    4810 months ago

    As someone who leans left and generally supports socialism, Hexbear is hot fucking garbage. Lemmygrad is only slightly better.

    They’re slowly killing the fediverse as reasonable people see their authoritarian propaganda and leave.

    • I don’t think the problem with Hexbear is political. Some of their points are questionable, but that’s of course up for debate.

      What tends to annoy me about their users is how obnoxious they can be. Between the flooding of comments and replies, the weird emojis and the numerous attempts at provocating people from outside of their little cicle (which happens both in their domestic communities as well as the federated ones), it all makes you wonder if they even care about the health of the fediverse

      •  awwwyissss   ( @awwwyissss@lemm.ee ) 
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        910 months ago

        I can deal with it by blocking communities and instances. But it’s not worth it to most people. I’ll never recommend the fediverse to anyone in it’s current extremist state.

        •  Ubermeisters   ( @Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip ) 
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          10 months ago

          My block list is getting ludicrously long though… this can’t be sustainable. I also want to recommend Lemmy to friends who are tired of reddit but yeah… between the furries and kiddy shit and the overwhelming amount of edgelords spewing hate under the guise of being anti hate… yeah. Its not flying with normal folk. I’m not even sure I am staying let alone inviting others. I definitely don’t want my friends and coworkers thinking I’m all about most of the content on Lemmy.

          • Furries? Never had to deal with those thankfully. As for the kiddy shit that’s a serious problem but I feel like it mostly concerns us admins, as with the current tools we have to react as soon as we get notice. As a user you hardly see it, from my experience.

            But yeah, the platform as a whole tends to be pretty polarized and extremist, which might scare many people away.

            •  Ubermeisters   ( @Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip ) 
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              10 months ago

              Most rational people I know won’t go to a website if they think there’s any chance of being exposed to that kind of content.

              Thanks for your volunteer work though, I used to mod some decent size subreddits and I know that it’s not a small amount of work to keep things clean.

  •  gk99   ( @gk99@beehaw.org ) 
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    4110 months ago

    Hexbear kinda just seem like trolls? Like no normal person seriously thinks making fun of a single dictator is equivalent to racism, it reads more like they’re genocide apologists who don’t want China’s government questioned.

    • This tracks with what I found when looking into defederation. Calling them leftists is kinda falling for their deception.

      They are authoritarians and use the cloak of leftism to defend authoritarian governments. They do not argue honestly and they brigade, coordinating on hexbear in plain sight. I defederated my two instances a while back for these reasons.

    • Short answer: you don’t.

      Long answer: there’s no flair system in the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin). We are working on building one limited to our instance but that takes time. Even then, once it will be finished it will only cover our instance. Users from other instances or platforms (such as yourself) will need extensions and 3rd party tools to get access to them. I plan on building those as well, but it will be only after the flairs are fully functional for our local users who of course are our primary concern.