They have a zero-tolerance policy for political viewpoints that differ from their own. That becomes a breeding ground for an extremely toxic echo chamber.
I have been doing the "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" book club at [email protected] recently which has been my only real interaction with hexbear. The book club has been great so far and if anyone wants to talk about feminism and masculinity should join.
There are a lot of in-group signaling across their own users which mostly shows up with acronyms, specific phrases and calling everyone comrade. This hasn't been that difficult in the book club which is long form text and discussion and everyone is respectful and nice. That being said I have blocked a few communities at hexbear because I have found them annoying and taking over my feed. So like everything here at Lemmy I had curate my own experience
What had me block the instance was how the majority of Hexbear posts and users I was encountering initially was how annoyingly spammy they were. Acting like Lemmy was Twitch chat, spamming giant ugly reaction stickers everywhere, literally behaving like 12 year olds.
Then I also started to notice the far-right authoritarian simping buried under all that chaos.
My understanding of the stickers is that on their instance they aren't massive. So it's some disconnect between their UI and others. But I might be misremembering.
If I see a comment with 12 replies, all from the same instance, all just the same emoji over and over, I don't care that it's small, that's spam to me. They have their culture, so let them have fun. But I'm not part of it, so leave me out, it's annoying. I think both of these are fair takes.
Yeah, as the other comment says, my understanding is the stickers are the size of an emoji on their instance. Something about either federation or the client on their server messes it up. Maybe some clients have fixed it, but mine (Sync) has not. Maybe it's unfixable if you aren't from their instance.
I fucking love hexbears. the weekly trans mega threads are my favorite place on lemmy.
At the same time I have probably blocked more hexbears than any other instance's users. I don't enjoy fighting online and just block anyone who is remotely aggressive or who i see bullying others.
I rarely see blocked users in the trans or other hexbear megas though (my client shows when a blocked user posts just not the name or content). I think there are some who use the server to argue their political positions from but it's definitely not the majority.
I don't blame anyone who can't abide the more ornery ones but if you ignore them the rest are just lovely and willing to share a lot of knowledge.
Marxist-Leninists side with the marginalized communities in society because
It's the correct thing to do, morally, and
The only way to gain real progress is to unify marginalized groups, rather than have individual groups fight separately.
I include works that go over these topics in my introductory Marxist-Leninist reading list. Marx and Lenin didn't really write on transgender struggles, but provided a logical framework of analysis and toolset that logically leads to support for the trans community along with other marginalized groups.
class warfare and capitalism always come down hard on marginalized people. Leftists believe in solidarity and equity which can often mean using your voice to protect and amplify marginalized groups.
they also have a great indigenous comm for example.
It's a combination of tankies and some more level headed leftists. They do have a decent proportion of OK users and the occasional decent meme, but the frequent genocide denialism and too many tankies have resulted in a lot of blocks and bans.
The "Just Kidding, but maybe not" kind of memes are both common in the tankie group as well in the right-wing group, which makes me thing it's just the same people with different costumes, also known as a reskinned model.
I’m sort of new to Lemmy, having only been here a few months, and I started my first account here in world, the one I am commenting with.
What I found is that world has many cool and fun and interesting communities, but for news ( world or USA centered) is really centralist USA based. World has cut off access to many other cool and interesting communities that may have different viewpoints here and there.
I think the few experiences by trolls here from other communities is more of a walled garden thing, and if world has a more inclusive mix this would solve a lot of issues .
Me migrating to another instance still allows me to participate here in world, and I simply ignore what I don’t like here and elsewhere.
Honestly, world has as many issues with gatekeeping and power hungry mods as instances and the only way to get the full lemmy experience is to pick and chose what fits best with oneself
I think the few experiences by trolls here from other communities is more of a walled garden thing, and if world has a more inclusive mix this would solve a lot of issues .
Yup, that's pretty much spot on. I don't really have a problem with .world myself. I do hear a lot of complaints about admin powertrips, but I've never used .world so I have not experienced this myself.
Hexbear isn't being paid for anything, they are largely made up of Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. Hexbear has been unafilliated with Lemmy for years before integrating with Lemmy a year ago.
You might be seeing their zero tolerance policy for liberalism in action, but if you genuinely want to know what their users are about, just visit it. Just hop on over to Hexbear.net and scroll the news megathread and whatnot, try to understand what's going on.
Finally, I want to question why you believe anyone would be paid to mess with Lemmy, moreover when the lead developers are aligned fairly closely on ideological lines. If they were here to "cause chaos," why would the devs support them ideologically? To ruin their own network? That narrative is just a wild hypothesis.
All responsible server admins have them defederated. Hate speech and genocide denial, that is almost certainly against the law in Canada, Germany, and other places. We defederated lemmygrad for the same reason.
In your instance' case, db0 has said IIRC that the Anarchists on Hexbear, while not aligning 100% with them, are generally good and worth being federated with.
Or they live in a country where genocide denial is legal. I live in Canada and my server is in Canada. I’m not willing to take the risk so my users can interact with assholes.
They were founded after being kicked off reddit, then self isolated from the fediverse for years, creating the echoiest of echo chambers. It's like those Appalachian families that were so isolated they basically developed their own culture, language and all. They've spent too long "struggle sessioning" together and driven out any of the more reasonable users with their purity tests. They think they're the "true" Lemmy users and only refederated to "spread the word" and antagonize all the "liberals" (read: anyone that's not 100% with them). The one thing I dislike about my server is that they haven't defederated from that place.
One note, "liberal" to them is synonymous with "nazi," and they do actually, openly, want to kill you for being one (from this comment alone lol, and me too, and everyone else they label liberal). They're losers who will never succeed in revolution, and most of them won't do anything beyond cry online, but they should still be considered dangerous and untrustworthy as one of them is liable to pull some dumb shit in the name of their religion and their god Marx (yes it is a religion if they treat it like one.)
What do you mean "they think they are the true Lemmy users?" Most on Hexbear only browse the local feed. Secondly, which struggle session got rid of the "reasonable people?" Are you referring to the time they kicked out all of the transphobes, and now have one of the largest concentrations of trans individuals on Lemmy? Genuinely, what "reasonable" opinion has been discarded?
Thank you! You seem like a pre-Reddit-fallout-lemmy-user :)
I specifically chose my instance because it’s not blocking or blocked by too many instances. I like the input from most sides, but will not comment much on hexbear posts I guess. Not worth it.
I ended up moving instances, I was on the same instance as you but the incessant propaganda becomes too much and their users get a free-pass to defend it without consequences so I decided to move to one that blocked them (and the other 2 problematic instances).
What purity test exactly do you feel is too much? Respecting pronouns? Not supporting capitalism? Not doing racism? I'm not aware of anything they ban for that any reasonable leftist shouldn't pass.
That sub was so disappointing. I stumped upon it by mistake one day, thinking that I'd find cheapo trap house music there. It sounded like a fun genre to listen to, like back in the early 2010s when brostep was huge. Miss those days...
Thankfully those of us on world have not had to deal with them for the better part of a year. There's so much wrong there it's kind of hard to know where to begin.
All I will really say for now is that they are perfect anti advocates for the things at the surface level they advocate for.
You would think having a healthy discourse and talking to each other, exchanging ideas would be better to proliferate a certain ideology.
All they do is try to insult or demand one is an all knowing being. Some read my comment and assume I’m from us and have to know every agency there is.
If they want to bring their ideologies out there they should stop trying to be destructive. All they accomplish is a negative image of their movement.
It’s like a 14 yo has learned about communism and is now super edgy towards everybody because he thinks he’s hacked the system.
They existed on their own Lemmy instance for years before federating at some point last year.
So, they likely had their own way of interacting, commenting, moderating etc that worked for them, that they had used/built/developed themselves (I mean systems & rules, not software) for years.
And they federated shortly after the Reddit API exodus.
So an echo chamber of extreme left wing users suddenly getting to interact with a whole bunch of new people, and an inrush of more mainstream users. It made for an interesting 6 or so months.
I haven't had any bad interactions with them directly, however I have seen and disagreed with a lot of their behaviour.
Not sure if I have their instance blocked, or if my instance has defederated them.
Certain authoritarian ideologies and well, ideologies in general. Depend on rejecting ideas and evidence. Ideologies are ideal, but not real. So it tends to devolve into shouting and name calling. Leninists hypocritically haranguing liberals and vice versa etc.
I would definitely be down for some anarco communism. But I think it's offensive to repeat the misnomer that ML is communism. Or ever has, ever will lead to communism. Anyone who looks to enact change through brutal, murderous suppression via a vanguard party. Could hardly exude a more juvenile thinking vibe. That "it's okay/good when we do it" BS.
The thing is they see anything remotely right of them as equal to being a card carrying SS Nazi. They have no capacity to consider shades of gray, incremental progress, etc. It's all or nothing, fuck you if you don't abide.
If you aren't dogmatically against absolutely positively every single detail of life in the west, you aren't good enough.
No server is. All of them are imperfect. However world is better than hex or grad. It is a simple fact. Regardless of whether you like it. Granted it is a low bar. Being heavily devoted to a heavily disproven ideology sort of puts you on the back foot to start with. But leninists have never let that stop them. But we absolutely do get a mix here on world since it isn't an echo chamber. Leninists and fascists alike.
For all you people out there in TV land, this user is a serial shitposter who deliberately misinterprets everything they read. Very "oh you like waffles? Just admit you hate pancakes" behavior. It goes without saying that this interpretation is disingenuous at best.
China is the largest economy in the world and has brought nearly a billion people out of poverty. Within a single lifetime, the USSR went from peasant farmers experiencing regular famine to putting people in space. And then capitalism brought back famine in the 90s. Cuba has a longer life expectancy than America.
If it talks like a tankie and quacks like a tankie...
I must have misremembered lemmygrad then. Same difference. I've encountered hexbears on other servers. It's one of many reasons I don't log into Midwest.social for instance. Well more that their hardware is overloaded. But federation with grad and hex is still a good reason.
Just block people you don't want to interact with. My instance isn't even federated with Hexbear but there are still people fitting that description. And plenty of folks there didn't fit that description.
The fringes of the political “wings” (left and right) seem similar to me, not so much in policy but in the rabid, simplistic attitudes and outright derision constantly sputtered.
I just don't get all the anti-hexbear hate I see on other Lemmy servers. Questioning your mainstream/western/capitalist beliefs and arguing about it shouldn't be ground for blocking them. I have yet to see any egregious behavior from them. Sure, I see somewhat outrageous takes on their own hosted communities, but have yet to see them cross the line on other servers.
But that's another complaint without providing actual examples. I could just as easily complain about the same things from liberal lemmy.world posters.
Setting aside the content of their comments, I have often found their commenting style to be obnoxious or rude. They're free to do their thing of course, but since I'm not into it, I've blocked that instance. Over time I've seen fewer and fewer comments from hexbear users, and I imagine that's because some instances have chosen to defederate from them.
Yes, a lot of instances have blocked them, and I have yet to see a proper justification for it, other than that they confront people's beliefs. As for being obnoxious or rude, I would love to see some example exchanges that make people think that. Unfortunately that has been difficult to come by so far. From what I have seen, they call people liberals, fascists, etc, and in turn people call them tankies, etc. Seems fairly even to me so far.
It's a firehouse of falsehood kind of thing. Fragment people's concept of reality to the point where people can't even have a conversation.
The "question your beliefs" crowd is just people trying to create an alternate (and false) narrative so they can control you.
And that's all hexbear ever does. People not as naive as you are about these things find them to be a waste of time and they do nothing other than interrupt actual conversations based in reality. Which isn't healthy for a discussion forum.
I suspect that your perspective of the world (geopolitically speaking) is very different from mine, so it would probably not be a constructive use of our time for either of us to go into the details of what you wrote.
Because they turn everything into a debate. I don't want to constantly be called a "lib" just because I don't think communism is the solution. These people would turn everything comment section into a warzone, even after I left all political communities. Even meme communities and communities about random unrelated topics became a minefield. I come here to destress and read some interesting stuff about topics I enjoy, not to be piled onto by 5 commies and be called a filthy lib for daring to say anything that doesn't fit their view. I'm left-wing myself, but to them everything to their right is evil. I'm happy I don't see their poison anymore
Ok, I understand you feel that way and believe that you're being sincere. I just rarely get to see actual examples to back up all the complaints. Like someone else commented on some other thread I read today, I see 10x more complaints about hexbears and tankies than I see actual bad behavior from them.
Tribalism is a hell of a drug, and generally speaking people don't like it when you support fascists that aren't on your team.
That said, I don't think my instance is federated with them so I only see their comments in rare circumstances, and even then half their takes are straight from RT
According to https://midwest.social/instances, it does not appear that your instance has blocked hexbear (see blocked tab), so your not seeing much of them seems to reinforce the idea that blocking them doesn't seem justified. (Edited for clarity).
Example: there used to be a nazi insrance called exploding-heads.com (or was it .net?anyways, doesnt matter), basically you just dont interact with them, eventually they got defedersted by many instances.
Lemmygrad and Hexbear are Marxist Leninists, the same ideology of USSR and China. Get it now?
If you disagree, just block their instance in your user settings.
Unfortunately, blocking an instance in settings don't block their users from commenting in other instance's communities. So you gotta either (1) use an app to block the users too, or (2) find an instance that defederates them.
What I really like about lemmy is the system critical mentality.
I don’t have a problem with people having different political ideologies. But I think that constructive discourse is in everyone interest. These people dgaf. They are everything but constructive.
Ahhh, that's what the alt-right instance was called. Thank you. I was consistently getting hexbear and exploding heads crossed in my head. For ... some reason.
(2) is the only real solution, they bypass the user-level block by reposting their propaganda in every community and instance that tolerates them so blocking them on your own doesn't really do anything.
Yeah but...how? How can you block from your account the whole of it? I keep getting communities belonging to hexbear popping into my feed, and I have to individually block each one of them. It's rather tedious. Isn't there a way to make a whole instance block from your account?
I think most popular apps (boost, voyager if i remember, etc.) have this feature. I dont believe lemmy has this natively.
Note that blocking instances doesn't mean you wont see comments from there. It only works on communities.
To be honest though, most of the problematic people only comment on specific posts/communities so blocking certain keywords and instances should fare pretty well.
Hexbear is sweet. Those people care more about the average human than liberals could ever imagine. If you dont understand them, try learning instead of being confused forever. I post this knowing I'll get dunked by .world, but this is what solidarity looks like.