Hexbear admins decide to shut down two communities. All hell breaks loose.
Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.
By which they mean the screenshot I crossposted in the OP above from their own comm's public comments!. That screenshot was in turn from a discussion in a public matrix chat for lemmy admins.
I am willing to give people the benefit of a doubt, this is some really fucking manipulative behavior and it's pissing me off!
We need to annoy sunaurus until he defeds from them.
Please do not do that. I pay monthly to be on lemm.ee precisely because lemm.ee doesn’t generally defederate from other instances. You may not like hexbear, but I appreciate seeing certain posts from there and learning about viewpoints that may challenge my own.
Speaking personally, them stating they outright lied to other instance admins is just one step too much. Wielding our collaborative spirit for manipulative purposes just sows distrust, and is downright asocial behaviour. It's so out of line, that I honestly don't believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face. But if not, that's even worse.
Thus they lied either way? Either preemptively to other admins or after being caught by their own - so whichever may be worse, it's still lying either way.
As much as I love my personal instance overlord for most of their beliefs and being a generally good person, they are incredibly naive, I assume purposefully so to avoid ever accidentally upsetting someone
Its an admirable trait to a degree even if it is incredibly frustrating
I honestly don't believe they actually lied. I think they were being earnest and only claimed they were being manipulative when caught by hexbears to save face.
Having read everything that's been linked here, I'm inclined to believe this.
It's of a piece with a lot of the behavior I see on Lemmy. It is, at the root, hostility to collaboration. It's the model where the person speaking is automatically right, and anyone who doesn't reach the same answers as them is an enemy who must be either corrected or defeated. Once you adopt that mindset, then of course lying to people to achieve that defeat is justified. After all, the people with the bad ideas are hurting everyone, on purpose, and they must be stopped. Reasonable conversation and argument doesn't enter into it, at that point.
The thing is, there's no single person who's got all the answers. There aren't any worldviews that apply correctly to all situations. Part of the idea of talking things out is that you can learn from others, detect missing pieces in your own thinking and correct them before they become too deeply ingrained into your worldview. I see way too many mods who think that their job is to remove the wrong ideas if someone "attacks" their community by posting them, or instance admins who think their job is to "wield" their instance against the people with the incorrect ideas. I think adding tribalism to the mix, allegiance to the other vegans or anarchists or whatever, just makes it ten times worse.
Even if the liberals or non-vegans, or whatever, are wrong, then the right answer is to talk with them. I understand that it might be difficult, because they might have the model that they have to defeat your incorrect worldview without listening to anything you're saying except to detect things they should disagree with, but for as long as that's your model on your side, you're doing something wrong, regardless.
I'm missing something. What was the difference between what they said in matrix chat to other admins, and what they said to their users? Because from your description it kinda sounded the same.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand what the appeal of all of this is.
I think it's the same hunger for excitement that makes sports appeal to people, or leads people to create drama at work.
That was a ruse in an attempt to get the other admins to close their drama communities like the ones that harassed vegantheoryclub admins but I did not expect the hexbear sleuths to find that so not only did the ruse fail but I blew up any chance of doing another in the future with other lemmy admins while further alienating hexbear users.
It blows my mind that they thought this would work.
Hexbear users are alienated because they enjoy being annoying. That's it. That's the secret. They can always stop doing that, that's always allowed. Being dishonest isn't great, but there are a lot of people in authority on Lemmy that are dishonest, and it's mostly not a problem.
I also like the implication that it was the unmasking of the ruse that made it not work, instead of the fact that this is the stupidest ruse I've ever heard of.
Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the “bit doing” during this heated period.
Not in general, of course. It's only a problem right now during this heated period. I wonder what some other "bits" are.
Like a lot of other insular online communities, the humor has gone through multiple levels of "deep frying" that it becomes almost alien to an ousider looking in.
One admin there pretty much admitted that their only purpose for interacting with the fediverse is trolling. There is legitimately nothing of value lost by ignoring them.
I've been following the drama too. Total misstep from the hexbear admins/mods. I didn't catch that TC69 deleted their account though, kind of a shame because they seemed to really stand up for trans people. I like hexbear, I agree with a lot of their points and like their community. I do not always agree with them, but I respect them in their fight and struggle. It's one of the only places I felt safe talking about my feelings about the recent US election because many people felt similar. I don't post or comment much on hexbear, I really should though. Hexbear did a survey that revealed a significant amount of their users were trans. I did not understand why the mods said white cis het men were the problem and was the majority of their userbase. I am a mixed bi cis latina, I know I do not have a hexbear account but I just wanted to point out that their assessment is wrong. I just hope they can recover from this.
They seem to have burnt a lot of their regulars with this one. I read two heart wrenching posts from ND people in their comms who were respectively devastated for being banned frivolously, or being stressed about potentially being banned frivolously. And I totally understand it as RSD is a common symptom and most of us are traumatized for being constantly excluded. It's part of the reason why I try to be careful with the banhammer because I know how much it affects ND people.
Yup. I blocked the instance after being on the receiving end of such a frivolous ban, together with bad faith modding, and having people jump down my throat a few too many times over miscommunication interpreted the worst possible ways to justify "dunking" so that they can look cool to people on the Internet.
What the admin did wrong was to let those comms exist in the first place. Not only can such behavior have deeper effects on those of us who are ND but, by allowing the comms, they helped to cultivate a toxic culture on the instance that is at the root of much of the inter-instance drama. They've been celebrating and rewarding dehumanizing and deriding others, which motivates others to create situations, whether through behaving poorly or tailoring context so that they too can be celebrated and part of the in-group.
Interestingly, some Hexbear users accused the francophone instance jlai.lu to be authoritarian when it opened a discussion, and a poll for the community to vote about defederating from Hexbear (a final decision has yet to be made).
Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had "reactionary" users and "no effort was made to address this" (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).
Then this happens, again with complete disregard for the community members.
Then an Hexbear admin unilaterally decided to defederate from jlai.lu claiming it had "reactionary" users and "no effort was made to address this" (no jlai.lu admin was contacted nor prompted about the existence of such users).
This is funny because it sort of mimics Russian, Chinese or North Korean politics to a degree as well. Everyone's authoritarian, fascists, Nazis - except for them, the beacon of democracy, freedom, and values.
Ye, this thing keep happening. I was recently in a discussion where someone was accusing slrpnk of authoritarianism for blocking hexbear immediately and pointing to the various defed threads on hexbear and arguing therefore that hexbear is the example to follow for democratic decision taking.
Je fais un tour sur jlai.lu de temps à autre, donc j'ai été un peu regarder ce qu'il s'est passé. Cette manière de vous tomber sur le râble sans même tenir compte du fait que vos utilisateurs, admin inclus, étaient plutôt d'avis que le thread dont tout est parti avait été ouvert par un gars froissé par ses interactions avec eux, et aller jusqu'à vous traiter de nazis pour le simple fait d'être francophones... C'est juste "😦"
Nice! I love waffles and I'm an artisan maple syrup maker. My favorites are big, fluffy Belgian waffles with berries, whipped cream, and maple syrup or chocolate chip pecan waffles with maple syrup.
The wife and I slept in today so we went to our local taco shop called Maskadores. It's basically Subway for Mexican food. Pick your dish, pick your meat, then your toppings. She had carne asada tacos with lettuce, pico, queso blanco, and cilantro. I had a chile relleno burrito. Literally a chile relleno wrapped in a tortilla with rice, refried beans, guac, cilantro, and pico. It was delicious.
Honestly, this online "revolutionary" shit is really starting to give SLA vibes. When I joined lemmy, I really gave them a chance, even though I'm strictly against authoritarianism of any stripe. I eventually blocked the instance, not because of negative interactions, but because my feed would be filled with their shit talking communities and all the comments were just gigantic emojis. It was just out of control shit posting.
I wanted to block their instance before it was possible in Lemmy, but thankfully my instance admin did. Nothing I've ever seen from them made me want to interact with them.
Honestly I think this speaks to the value of having user-level blocking of instances rather than defederation. Maybe one day that will be incorporated into Lemmy (or similar).
You can do it now in PieFed, or some apps like Sync or Connect. Otherwise you can only block communities but not all users from an instance, short of becoming an admin yourself or moving to one that has done what you wanted to see done. More details in [email protected].
I doubt we'll ever see it in Lemmy proper, especially as the protections that were offered in the past took so long to arrive and then were subsequently rolled back to become weaker - it's just not a priority for the admins who constantly ban others at the drop of a hat, but don't seem to want to build tools that allow the reverse.
The problem is that this really harms broader outreach efforts. If the fediverse is only tolerable with the right block list, then most people who try to give it a shot will just be turned off immediately. And that's not even getting into the potential security issues associated with malicious instances.
The hexbear folks can have their clownshow, just keep it in the clowncar. Sounds like the drivers are tripping balls and the clowncar needs some maintenance.
I don't know enough about Hexbear, my interactions with them in the communities I go to have been overwhelmingly positive. But I recognise the toxicity elsewhere. That said, the moderators and admins here were clearly on the right side and tried to make positive changes. It's a shame there's opposition to that.
Of course the members of an extremist echochamber tend to usually be friendly towards each other. Makes it even more amusing when we see all hell breaking lose and the masks coming off.
I got curious and read a couple of the threads. I think they are mentally ill. In my brief interactions with them, they called me a liberal and sent me threats of violence, and didn't want to hear about reasons why Biden was good. Fair enough. This whole mess sounds for all the world like an LLM hallucinating a deranged exaggerated caricature of a far-left community.
I can't even make sense of it. An admin went on an alt account, and banned their own main account, and then everyone got really mad about that, because they were being transphobic when they sent a message to their other account, and now they're saying the whole thing was a "bit," and the site has too many male users, and there are a whole bunch of people who got banned somehow that they're now unbanning, and also they're tightening up their policy about bigotry and apologizing because they blamed the whole thing in the end on the males, and that explanation would imply there's a difference between men and women, which they can't do. It was a struggle session. I am not making any of that up.
As far as I can tell, there is no problem at all and never was, and they managed to create a massive problem. It's like someone was walking down the street, and somehow fell down, and all of a sudden their leg fell off. I did learn some new words, though.
I don’t even want to know what the heck all that means or is about. It sounds like a caricature for real. I try to focus on non fiction things in the real world. I simply don’t remember any of these childish discussions being applicable in my life despite theoretically being the primary target audience.
There’s a limit for insufferableness and chronically online tankies are way past it
I have others blocked, only a couple because of bad user or mod behavior. Most haven't done anything wrong, they're just in languages I don't speak and it was filling my feed with posts I couldn't read, lol.
But why rebrand it?
It already was the Fediverse.
Just because Meta decided to start its own instance, we're now rebranding it for them? Fuck that.
Threads is not even playing by the same rules.
They basically just took the activity pub protocol and made their own closed source clone.
I already thought they had one of the most "redditesque" userbase of Lemmy. The mods and admins being on par for the course isn't surprising. Also, with the lack of trust in their users displayed here, it seems like they reject the monster they've created...
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase. I've had a much improved Lemmy experience since unsubscribing to most of it. Hexbear is its own thing, unknown in my experience and unique to itself.
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase
And I won't be the one telling you otherwise. It's reddit 2, period.
I won't deny that Hexbear developed a culture while slow-cooking in their corner (nor would I say there's nothing interesting to read on their instance, very far from it). However, I've seen the same kind of behavior coming from them that turned me off reddit in the first place. It makes me avoid interactions with them...
Sounds like an experiment from a Fallout vault. Interesting, but it would likely devolve into a single person using a macro to auto ban every other admin besides themselves or their pals.