As an Asian/Taiwanese, I do not understand why Hexbearians feel the need to point out what's racist for us.
The picture of Xi the Pooh is clearly a parody and pointed specifically at Xi and the CCP, and not a general racist insult to Asians. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, in East Asia knows that, including the Chinese themselves. We use/refer to it a lot ourselves on our own social media platforms in Taiwan (習維尼, 習: Xi, and Winnie the Pooh: 維尼), and if you mention any of it on Chinese social media Weibo/WeChat, you likely will get banned from the platform.
Kind of reminds me of cultural appropriation gone out of hand, where Westerners feel the need to be angry at other Westerners for wearing Japanese Kimonos or Chinese Quipaos. Like, no one here is offended. We don't understand why those people feel the need to be angry for us.
Edit: I just saw a Hexbear comment on another thread posting that China doesn't ban Winnie the Pooh because Disney is able to exist. Well, no shit. It's in the context of Disney. Put that phrase in any other thread on their platform (preferably political) and see what happens, then can you claim that the CCP doesn't ban the word Xi the Pooh.
Yeah as far as I know the Winnie the Pooh thing originated in the PRC. Apparently Xi is really upset about it and did a hard ban on it. But it's kinda a Streisand effect kind of thing so places outside of the CCP's control kinda ran with it.
But the hexbears are just conditioned to say it's racist to try to shut down any conversation about it. I mean it's their tyrant using censorship for an extremely petty reason. I probably wouldn't call him Xi the Pooh myself if it weren't for the fact that this tyrant is so butthurt and petty about it. And that's what makes it hilarious. And fuck that guy.
Kind of reminds me of cultural appropriation gone out of hand, where Westerners feel the need to be angry at other Westerners for wearing Japanese Kimonos or Chinese Quipaos.
Yeah the whole cultural appropriation thing is weird. Sure it's wrong to trivialize something that holds a lot cultural or religious significance to others. But people generally like seeing others participate in their culture, and they'll let you know when something is sacred and not for a casual tourist to participate in.
When I went to Peru I bought a shirt from a tourist shop that was the local style. Everyone seemed happy to see that. One older woman said she was happy to see a westerner wearing the local style and invited me to a wedding. Approval all around... except for one guy that said I probably shouldn't be wearing that shirt. It was a white guy from the UK (judging from the accent).
And the kimono thing is really weird. When I was in Kyoto, anyone could dress up as a samurai or a geisha. Not only was it acceptable, the shops would give discounts to people dressed up this way. Because it made things more fun. This may be shocking to some people, but cosplay is fairly popular in Japan. I also saw some dudes in a park cosplaying as American 1950s geasers. Was I offended by this because they were appropriating our culture? Of course not, they seemed to be having fun and nobody dresses that way anymore anyway.
The idea of a blanket stigmatizing of western people having any participation in other cultures seems like it'll be a problem long term. If it's ok for everyone in the world to adopt western culture, but not ok for westerners to adopt anything from anyone else's culture, then western culture spreads and other cultures don't. Seems to me like what happens with colonialism, but this time with good intentions! But intentions doesn't change the result. And if the result is the spread of western culture while preventing the spread of other cultures, seems like a bad result to me.
If I were a head of state, on a suitable occasion I'd absolutely make sure that the state present is a selection of the finest local honeys. Also some mead for completeness' sake. Let their diplomatic corps bend over backwards attempting to not insult such a fine offering of friendship.
Edit: Someone clearly is salty enough to downvote a comment they didn't read or even bother to translate themselves. FYI, it's about the typhoon weather here in Taiwan. Not even remotely political/on topic. Pathetic.
Not really westerners. Pretty much the whole US left with their history of fucked-up race relations and cultural penchant for either pussy-footing or waving their dicks around, nothing in between, and a small splattering of leftist from other countries drawn into their bullshit reasoning and inability to see context that is beyond the brim of their burger.
They are so eager to prove themselves the assholes that people accuse them of being, and then they whine and cry about instances defederating from them.
I'm pretty sure the whole thing is a false flag/astroturf to discredit sincere leftist discourse. It seems a lot like a blend of bad leftist parody, and edgy 14-year-olds who fell for it
So, the primary reason that happens, and the primary reason I'd vote defederation on them every time, is because their instance has down votes disabled for some forsaken reason. It's not 100% the users fault, it's because a comment is the only mode of response they have available for something they don't agree with. So a negative image macro is their downvote. Due to this, they end up flooding other instances threads and only see a bunch of people who agree with the op of a thread or a post, which of course makes them feel like they need to show their displeasure way what's been posted. Meanwhile we can see the 500 to 9.2k ratio on the racist hot take.
The way our instances are run is just fundamentally incompatible.
Don't listen to hexbear users when they say they "defend themselves" from homophobia and transphobia. One user thought the admin of Blahaj.zone was being transphobic for not allowing politics in every community. Hexbear users will literally just lie about the repamant amount of homophobia and transphobia to justify their existence here.
That whole thing was a shit show and I somehow was able to stumble across each and every single part of it as it happened.
It all happened merely days after hexbear said Blahaj was somehow not safe for their LGBT members, so then having those new accounts pull this was so obvious as where could the users came from.
Hexbear was/is a shit show. Then again, I hate politics and idiots with a burning passion. (Grew up in the South with Far right idiots belching brain dead arguments) It's very hostile. I was semi-fine with hostility on Reddit, I'd happily bite and fight. But, I'm honestly trying to have a good experience, so Hexbear is a no-go for me.
And for the inevitable herd of Hexbearians that will no doubt squawk this post to hell: I am a nonbinary, demisexual, melungeon witch, I can't stand racists or bigots or *phobes, I don't care for politics or politicians, but will happily vote for whoever doesn't try to make my existence illegal!
They are like wasps. If you agitate one, you'll get mobbed by countless others. I tried to reason with one yesterday and I'm still getting notifications from random hexbear users coming at me.
I had the displeasure of interacting with someone before I knew what that instance was. Someone posted that anyone who supported any democratic candidate in the US should be hit by a truck, and that they wanted to do physical harm to them. I reported it, and the mod who got the report posted my name publically in the thread and proceeded to paste some manifesto on how cops brutalized homeless people and trans people, so therefore if someone votes for a democratic senator it is justifiable to physically harm or kill that person.
I have blocked every community on the instance. It was helpful being brought up by the mod, cause I clicked on their profile and they modded 15 or so communities on their instance, so I was able to click directly on those communties and block, then click on the next one etc.
I made a post like this on my old instance's main community and it got flooded by 400+ hexbear comments telling me how stupid I am. No, the only real solution is to make a new account on an instance that's defederated. Good luck.
I like lemmy.ca pretty well. I've just recently learned that lemmy.world is defederated, but they're already one of the biggest instances. All I did was browse https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, sorted by usage and skipped the top few entries, and checked each instance to see if they'd defederated. I tried to go smaller than lemmy.ca but I got bored lol
I don't understand why blocking (or "defederating") instances is such a core part of the design of lemmy but not actually supported on a per-user basis.
Defederating is core to the fediverse. Lemmy just uses a shared protocol to exchange content. And as others have said, Kbin has instancr blocking, community/magazine blocking, and user blocking. You could just create an account on a Kbin instance if it's important enough. You still get to see the same things.
Kbin has instance blocking, community/magazine blocking, and user blocking.
Kbin doesn't have instance blocking yet, just domain blocking, which is for hiding posts that link to a particular domain. Domain blocking is also bugged right now, and will just hide random stuff from you.
Yeah I think it's about time to get that feature. As a user I have preferences that don't necessarily match with the defederation policies of any instance and I would very much like to choose for myself which instances I want to see.
In my case: I'm not interested in polarising, divisive, toxic content and I really don't care if it's coming from the left or from the right. But it seems to me that I have to choose a side, because some instances are blocking the right wing extremism and some blocking the stuff to the left, but not both.
Reading subscribed communities only is not an option, because then I will miss out on new stuff. And blocking all these awful communities in "all" by hand is too much work.
tl;dr not being able to block instances as a user is giving me a bad Lemmy experience
Theres no way yet, suposedly the devs are planing to give that option in the future.
Right now im just not loging into lemmy as much as before, the ambience became way more toxic than the first 2 or 3 months i started using it, and i believe its beacause of hexbearians. Lots of bad takes (pariculary genocide apologism) have been thriving on lemmy since they refederated, whuch was ussually trashed before, so i say they are behind that. And when they have more sane takes, they screw them up by telling you to go read Mao, seriously, Mr "Best politics are the ones that come from a barrel of gun" Mao. He was a fucking thug not a great mind of comunism.
I even re-made an account on reddit ffs, and reddit fucking sucks because my comments get ignored into oblivion no mather where i comment, and its not shadowbaning i think.
So my recomendation is try going somewhere else while the option of blocking instances becomes availabe or touch some grass, although grass sucks since it doesnt fight back when asked about politics and it becomes really old very quickly.
Because i like shit just works and i like that it isnt that heavy on defedration with other instances, but thats probably gonna change soon since it seems we are holding votes to defederate from hexbear.
I would love to block that trash completely. Every interaction I’ve had with any of them and their posts has just given me the impression they are just trolls and nothing else. If anyone truly thinks they are leftists, I question your definition of left. They can go and stay in their little instance and show all the bullshit and talk all the nonsense they want to.
If an instance doesn't want a negative reputation for doing certain things, they should prioritize not doing those certain things.
If you act like an arse, people are going to think that you're an arse. If you want people to think that you're pleasant, you should try acting pleasant. If someone acts like an arse but expects to be called pleasant, I would think that person is delusional. Too many people are like this, then get upset when people don't want to deal with them.
Frankly, life is too short to deal with certain people. Why would I waste my time and happiness for a troll?
I might block the instance soon. It doesn't seem like I would be losing much at the moment.
They defederated from us. They said abilism and racism or something. I think they didn't like the Winnie the Pooh Xi Jinping. But also I feel like they didn't really like people challenging their beliefs.
As a left-leaning person that would be nice to believe, but I have seen young teenagers who get a taste of shitty capitalism just run to the other side of the spectrum and become 'communists who know nothing about communism except that it's better than capitalism'.
I think actually building a working system of governance that doesn't concentrate corruptible levels of power in a few hands is hard, and many people lack the patience and intelligence to work out the problem. So they run to 'easy answers' that make them feel morally superior and offer the chance of something different (even if worse), especially when they are young and reactionary.
Its the same way some Bernie fans ran to Trump because they lacked the patience to dismantle the duopoly for real, so they hoped he'd do it somehow. We're all feeling worse off, but at least they got to 'show the democrats, right?
I think you're both right. I think some of it is right wing people trying to convince the people you're talking about to abandon morality and not question the "communist" countries (which somehow they still include Russia?) no matter what they do. They don't care about doing what's best for workers if it's anti-western. That's not leftist.
Compelling concecture. I also wonder if there are really groups of people like that (i mean, how do they behave in physical, that must be sort of punks?) -- or if it is part of an orchestrated disruption and possibly false flag. I read it's only about 15 accounts to block if one wanted to get rid of the obnoxious ones.
Have any hints that back it up?
Edit: do not mind, i have read farther down. It also seems to have deviated from the original CTH community, as in "unfriendly take-over", which was even stated by a HB account.
Besides, this helped me to finally understand the confusion about the "liberal" adjective. It's understood differently in USA, from most everywhere else. :-)
I was gonna mention this. The best part too is that if a user is "defederated" by the app then you can simply click show and then the comment pops up if they are a hexbear user.
I honestly 99 percent of the time have little to no issue with their users but I don't want tankie spam on my instance so it works well.
Idk but I blocked like a dozen of them or so and they just disappeared. They have a few always-online users that you should just block when they pop up.
Yeah, I have blocked hexbear & numerous weird gay/fetish porn communities. Make sure you're logged in. Click on the post & navigate to the community....then...towards the top before all the posts, there's a bunch of options. One being to 'block'. I have to scroll to find it.
Nav to offensive community
Block their ass
It should be noted I use Sync for Lemmy. You may or may not have this on your render/UI. Should be able to block.
I also use sync. And i also use the option to block certain words in titles. If you use this list, your feed gets a lot less toxic. Don't judge me from this list, it works for me and a lot less first world problems.
I absolutely will judge you for that list. You don't want to hear about capitalism and climate change? Like the two biggest things that are going to affect our future. Lots of people are unaware of the water they swim in to some extent, but to intentionally avoid it like this is another level of ignorance.
There's some real vibes here of someone who's so privileged that current politics already serves them and they feel like they can just ignore it. Self-described "apolitical" people are still political, it's just that their politics are usually awful because they don't think about them.
If I ever thought of using a filter like this - and I really don't think I ever will - the fact that you're the kind of person to use it makes me even less likely to consider it. I never want to shove my head in the sand to that extent.
Go ahead and block me for saying this, I wouldn't want to make you feel slightly uncomfortable for the few seconds it takes to scroll past. It's better if you just don't know I exist. One less voice to antagonise you with reality.
It currently depends on which client you're using. The devs are working on building it into the server side, but at least 'connect for lemmy' on android allows you to block instances yourself.
Not that I know of, but it should be added in for those who don't want to interact with people from Hexbear. If people have the freedom to block an instance for themselves it would expand the decentralization that Lemmy is built on, since people don't have to move to those instances to block out Hexbear.
I've read that blocking the Hexbear domain is a solution to this, but that isn't a proper solution, since those who aren't tech-literate would have a pretty hard time doing that, so a first-party solution would be the best.
This kind of thing reminds me of the early 2010s /r/atheism. There's definitely some meaningful discussion to be had, but it quickly got overwhelmed by edgy teenagers and culminated in the infamous "In this moment I am euphoric"" quote and things simmered down.
I expect there's going to be some batshit insane development in this space that'll make things calmer. However looking at the state of the world it might be WW3 making things calmer because most of the edgy teenagers will get drafted /s.
If you are on browser using unlock origin, you can use custom cosmetic filters like sh.itjust.works##div.post-listing:has-text(/hexbear.net/). Not perfect and does not hide comments, but I've been happy enough with just this.
I heavily endorse the block feature. It's not reddit level of activity, after blocking enough you barely notice them. And I only block the most annoying users.
The problem is that there apparently currently is a limit of 1000 blocks per user. With the inevitable spambots and trolls going to appear over the years it is annoying having to spend a lot of those on these guys.
If you're using the connect app (if not, you should try it!), just tap the three dots any post you see by them, and click "block instance." Easy peasy.
Go to kbin.social/d/\ ("d" for Domain), e.g. https://kbin.social/d/hexbear.net. In there on the sidebar you'll see the Follow button; next to it will be the block button. Hit the block button and that's that.
Works on any instance running kbin, not just kbin.social, though there's only 4 right now IIRC.
I just block the obnoxious users as they show up. Already got the most prolific posters; now I just see the occasional comment on posts outside of that instance. Maybe 2 of them haven't been annoying and haven't been blocked.
I think if you are active in communities related to news and politics you're going to see political and news related posts. It's kind of a part of the deal.
It's kind of a big part of politics. It isnt politics if it isn't involved enough to contend with propaganda and extremism. That'd mostly just be entertainment, like your typical late night TV coverage of news and politics.
People don’t want to block hexbear because they disagree with them, they want to block that instance because they often act like they’ve got the social skills of a neglected 5-year-old on meth. Further, because that’s who they’ve surrounded themselves with they have convinced themselves it’s normal or even appreciated.