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.
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.