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@lemm.ee
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    11 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.

    • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
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      11 months ago

      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

    • Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip
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      11 months ago

      I’m sure fucking tired of it, it’s definitely making my experience here not as worthwhile

      • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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        11 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@lemmy.zip
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          11 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.

          • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
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            11 months ago

            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@lemmy.zip
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              11 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.

            • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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              11 months ago

              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.

    • r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • awwwyissss@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        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.

  • gk99@beehaw.org
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    11 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.

    • natebluehooves@pawb.social
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • Throwaway@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Being left and auth aren’t mutually exclusive. Look at Stalin for example.

        • natebluehooves@pawb.social
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru
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      9 months ago

      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.

    • Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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.

  • RobotToaster@infosec.pub
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    11 months ago

    Hexbear is where r/ChapoTrapHouse went after they got banned from reddit for being too cringe even for reddit.

  • Floey@lemm.ee
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    11 months ago

    Based on what I’ve seen hexbears would not use slurs like bitch and retard.

    • Malgas@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • pjhenry1216@kbin.social
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          11 months ago

          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.

  • catfish@programming.dev
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
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      11 months ago

      Yeah. But then you would have had to interact with those kind of human beings. I say you made a decent deal, overall.