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.
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
Nah. They rather live in echo chamber than create a healthy community. Same thing happened on Reddit. The history repeats itself.
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The SJW admin thinks that their comment floods are a product of downvotes being disabled on their instance.
I’ll enable downvoting on mine as long as it doesn’t lead to the Reddit situation where users are penalized site-wide for getting too many downvotes.
I’m sure fucking tired of it, it’s definitely making my experience here not as worthwhile
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.
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.
Thanks for your good work making this happen. As discouraging as the extremist politics and propaganda is, I really hope community-owned social media is the future.
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.
The good thing about the fediverse is that anyone can start their own instance and defederate from instances that are known to have problems with troublemakers and won’t do anything about it.
It’s infinitely better that Lemmy is going left rather then right because if it went right, the media would pick it up and then start casting FUD on the entire platform as being a cesspit of white supremacist groupthink and radicalization.
I imagine the Lemmy developers probably run join-lemmy.org and could start removing sites from there, but currently a lot of the general instances are listed there and they seem pretty sane. The only thing I find concerning is when someone claims that Joe Rogan is equivalent to Qanon.
I’ve seen people say another Lemmy user will “get the wall” two unrelated times. I’ve had comments correcting disinformation deleted with no explanation on lemmy.ml
On another account Lemmygrad users followed me around and downvoted every post I made. I ended up with -3,000 karma on that account.
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.
Being left and auth aren’t mutually exclusive. Look at Stalin for example.
Fair! These folks do not actually believe in any of the leftist policies they claim to like, however.
If you claim the PRC is anything but an authoritarian capitalist hellscape, you have nothing of value to contribute. The world is filled with authoritarians who use the popularity of leftist policies to get into power, then put those people in camps.
If they’re going to do nothing but troll and be toxic, then unfortunately it’s necessary. I also feel strongly that excessively defederating or banning visitors from the entire instance harms the fediverse. Instance bans and defederation should be used when instances have shown that they can’t be relied on to communicate meaningfully outside their instance.
That’s what I was thinking, though you can’t rely on assumptions like that. It feels like they’re intentionally making stuff up for leverage.
All hexbear people need to be banned.
Many of them strike me as CCP propaganda peddlers. These types should be banned. If there are others that legitimately have opinions, I’d say leave them and let them be corrected by the larger community.
That said… If they abuse accounts and voting to pump their opinions (it feels like this may be happening), then ban them.
Tl;dr: Ban all shilling, astroturfing, and organized propaganda peddling.
That sounds a bit extreme.
If they are denying genocides that may in fact be something necessary for the health of the community via defederating them.
Nope.
Hexbear is where r/ChapoTrapHouse went after they got banned from reddit for being too cringe even for reddit.
Based on what I’ve seen hexbears would not use slurs like bitch and retard.
How do I flair up on the Fediverse?
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.
Ah. Thanks for the informative answer and all your hard work.
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I have seen more meta-commentary about the controversy than I have actually experienced the controversy.
Beehaw is defederated from hexbear, so it’s literally impossible for you or me to see them without going to another instance.
I take it that beehaw’s walled garden policy is working as intended, if you users aren’t even aware of the tornados of shit going on out there lol. Good for you.
Personally I am kinda enjoying the chaos, but some threads over on sh.itjust.works are pretty wild with the Hex invasion.
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Same. I’ve seen very little from them, but a lot of complaints about it. I’ve seen a bit of a tussle in the comment sections on posts that explicitly call them out. Usually it’s just one of them though. Honestly, it feels like very few individuals are causing an issue and blocking the users is probably more fediverse friendly, but I still leave it up to the instance admins. Instances can defederate with them if they have a problem. They’ll still see other stuff but those instances won’t see them or their comments.
It’s pretty rare from my experience to just see one of them in a post. They seem to always post together as a group and spamming pictures to the point it’s hard to read the thread. You’re either lucky, always active at times these people are not, or your instance has already defederated from them.
I’ve only seen their comments in the past few days and I have seen their posts, though not recently. So it’s entirely plausible. But again, I defer to those who have more data. I’m entirely on board if instance admins determine it’s a big enough problem. I just want to make sure it’s at least considered whether it’s a user problem or instance problem is all.
Honestly, it’s quite enjoyable to watch from the sidelines. The only thing that annoys me is you can hide that you’re posting from an instance by editing your name (just like OP has done), and it seems every hexbear does it.
LMAO “hide” is a pretty strong word. You know you can still figure it out just by hovering over their name, right? Or clicking on their profile, clicking the fediverse icon… plenty of ways to find out, it’s just slightly less obvious.
There’s no bad faith behind it. I do that just because I like it better, looks cleaner to me.
It’s still hiding it, just like when a corporation changes their name, or is bought out by another but doesn’t change their name. Yes, you can figure it out by going to a website somewhere, or reading a newspaper from a decade ago… plenty of ways to find out, it’s just slightly less obvious.
I never said it was in bad faith.
I never said it was in bad faith.
I assumed that was what you meant, my bad.
I remembered it showing up if you hovered but it doesn’t, that’s true. I guess I was looking at the link below instead.
these fucken losers daydream about being relevant even in the most pathetic ways, lmao what utter muppets, noone gives a shit, just block their shitty instances.
I guess hexbear was a better place to look for a legitimate successor to r/stupidpol
Yeah. But then you would have had to interact with those kind of human beings. I say you made a decent deal, overall.
I hate commies and libtards. I’m not a rightie either I just hate loud hive minds
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So PM_ME_YOUR_FOUCAULTS@hexbear.net isn’t from hexbear? And he’s brand new after being a member since July 2020? Damn, color me surprised.
Of the two posts I mentioned one account is indeed very new and not from Hexbear, the other one is 3 years old and IS from Hexbear.
There might be some external actors trying to stir the water, indeed that tends to happen pretty often all over the internet, but some Hexbear users are definitely involved.
What are you on about? The disingenous “this is racism” thread OP linked was posted and entirely populated by hexbear users registered at hexbear.
Also please don’t pretend this is the only time hexbear users has done this, when that is in fact something they have done systematically since they federated (and even longer, because they did the same back on reddit when they were CTH).
Thats complete bs.
Probably true to some extent, the problem to me is that if they are an anti-fascist instance, why can’t they clean up their own trolls? If some dudes act the way magas imagine communists to be, how can’t they self-police a bit? It shows that it must be incredibly easy to infiltrate antifa to make it look bad (probably happens too, lol).
They aren’t anti-fascist at all. They are very much pro-authoritarianism. And their behaviour is working as they intend.
Eh, fine…I’d consider myself experienced in online community dynamics and a bit of non-american politics, so I try to interpret things in the light of what I’ve seen in the wild and the people I’ve met in real life, but this shit is out of my reach. Besides, politics always is a mess when it isn’t face-to-face (trolling, astroturfing, gatekeeping, posing, muddying the waters, sealioning, dogwhistling…) or in a controlled environment , I just wish every thread didn’t turn political.
So what you’re saying is you’re a REPUBLICAN?
(I’m kiiiidiiiiing)
