I can't speak about lemmygrad since the instances I'm on all defederate from it, but Hexbear users have a reputation for being generally aggressive, grating, and immature. It's like that kid in class who keeps interrupting the teacher because they think they're funny and clever. e.g., some were screaming at me that I can't be an anarchist and I know nothing about anarchism since I'm married, replying with third-grade tier memes for some confusing reason
Thought I should add it was them informing me that certain countries banning same-sex marriage while endorsing heterosexual marriage is just fine, actually. They espoused an objectively homophobic belief, and when I referenced my own marriage, they switched to calling me ignorant about anarchism. There are anarchist texts exploring the issue and some of the potential problems with traditions like marriage, but it's not dogma. Nor do I view my own relationship as hierarchical.
This has the energy of a white gay man in a marriage pointing at a trans polycule and calling them homophobic because they said he had a bad take about how bourgeois privileges are more important than positive rights for queer homeless people.
White gay men wielding their gayness as a cudgel against people who are queerer and more marginalized then them sure is a gross thing to see.
They are hardline Marxist-Leninists, something that is very rare in the western world even amongst those who identify as leftist or socialist. If their views make you uncomfortable, then you're not a ML, which is okay.
Left-wing politics is a very broad spectrum, and a lot of Lemmy users lean towards the more moderate end which brings them into conflict with the more radical communities that are Lemmygrad and Hexbear.
Just take a look at this question, all of the answers are from lemmygrad and hexbear users. You are not going to get a good answer from them because they're the people you're asking the question about.
They are not hated they're just annoying, no one really cares about their opinions the problem is is that they try and push their opinions on everybody else.
Yeah, they have a very alternative interpretation of geopolitics and they're loud about it. If there was a flat earth instance with users that spammed every physics thread there would be some grumbling just the same.
The hexbear and lemmygrad users/posts I run across in All mostly remind me of those street corner preachers. I don’t care one way or another about their ideologies but it’s tiring that they always feel the need to shout it in your face.
I don’t hate them but find them to be obnoxious and mostly cult-like.
Well, when I see a .ml user from here on out I'm not sure I'll be able to give them the same sort of leeway.
I had one of their users confirm they were racist. Then I saw that only the parts where our conversation was removed by mods, and not shit canning the user.
You want people to like you, don’t lie down with racists.
I concur about .ml. It's been eye opening being on the receiving end of a homophobic rant by a moderator of their world news community implying I'm not queer enough. It wouldn't surprise me that they're racist, too. Bigots tend to subscribe to more than one strain of bigotry.
I know it shouldn't matter what people like that think, but I'd be lying if I said I'm not disappointed and dismayed. I've survived so many things and had a long hard road to self-acceptance. It's disgusting to be invalidated by someone who likely has more than I've ever had.
Lemmy isn't Marxist-only. The majority of Lemmy users are what the more vocal Lemmygrad and Hexbear users deride as "libs." As a thought experiment, imagine that you are one of us for a moment and then browse Local on one of those.
I haven't seen or maybe haven't noticed much of lemmygrad. But hex bear has a culture of spamming the same handful of images, using them like punctuation in their posts. And they show up huge in my reader at least (I just found out they look small to them.) So it's like you're trying to have a discussion and someone comes parading through with like five crappy drawings that take up all the space. Also I don't mind having Marxists around but they tend to want to steer every discussion toward it, regardless of its relevance. Can't wait to be able to block the instance.
I'm the only person I've ever seen on Lemmy running an instance from a nominally communist country (maybe there are others?). You can come hang out with me I guess. I'm not qualified to be a proper communist though -- I've read very little of the literature, and leave politics to the Party. Which I am not even actually a member of. I'm basically Boxer from Animal farm, but ended up happily married and with a decent standard of living instead of shipped off to the glue factory.
I'm am a mercenary science hermit though, so my instance is very quiet! There are three people on my instance, two are me and the other is a bot I wrote doing I-Ching divinations using physics.
There's a detailed description on my home instance, along with other stuff.
The short version is it uses a pair of BJT transistors to produce and amplify diode breakdown noise. That's amplified to TTL levels by some hex inverters. Then an 8-bit microcontroller passes it through a Von Neumann whitewashing algorithm (clock-cycle balanced in assembly language) to produce unbiased bits, which it accumulates into bytes. It's not a 'safe' way to use transistors and they will fail one day, but it will be fine for quite some time still.
Then an ESP32 samples the bytes from the 8-bit MCU. It connects to Wi-Fi and pushes it to the cloud over MQTT. A server listens for the random bytes, and uses them with the traditional I-Ching algorithm (yarrow-stick probabilities). Coding the yarrow-stick probabilities into an algorithm was a pain compared to the newer method that uses coin tosses :D
Also I had to convert the I-Ching to JSON, so I could programmatically pull the correct divination from it. The whole thing is gloriously absurd.
I have build a few particle detectors so I can use quantum-tunneling to produce the entropy instead (so an upgrade from a hardware RNG to a quantum RNG), but the radiation sources I have access to are a bit too weak to generate sufficient entropy.
I can't imagine any of this has any practical application, unless you happen to be a time traveler. In that case have work to do, meet me last week and we'll talk about it :P
Oh incidentally if the bot is down, let me know and I'll gently beat it into submission so it works again.
Leninism is antithetical to Marxism. As you said. If they were Marxist there wouldn't be a big issue. They're Leninist as an angry 13 year old can be. Combined with the fact that people in the West, the US especially, have no idea what either one is. And that's the problem.
Lemmygrad I can't comment on. As far as I can tell they basically just talk politics and I'm not interested in microwaving my brain by obsessing about politics online. Haven't seen them out in any of the threads I've been on.
Hexbear I've enjoyed honestly. They've got nice hobby communities and it's all I'm here for. Quality of discussion is usually pretty good. My take on people hating Hexbear is people have made their personality getting mad about politics and Hexbear don't share their views. People screaming "tankie!" just seemed deranged to me, literally who cares what a handful of nerds in the US think of China. Neither of you have any influence on what China does at all.
Im not in alot of communities but I've never seen the heavy handed claims everyone makes about seemingly any lemmy user to the left of Biden. I've seen occasional snark, but nothing out of line for standard internet snark/trolling that those same people never mind when the right does it. 🤷
Lemmygrad and Hexbear aren’t “leftist” in the confused sense that Americans usually mean “leftist.” They’re actually leftist in the original sense, meaning that they want to abolish private ownership of the means of production. To the extent they’re “widely hated,” it’s largely because the Anglosphere has been indoctrinated against real, actual socialism their entire lives.
That's not the part people have an issue with, the part where their users deny genocides, call everyone that has a less extreme left opinion of politics Nazis, end up being so "anti-racism" that they're racists themselves and take all critics as personal attacks, that's what people have an issue with.
end up being so “anti-racism” that they’re racists themselves
anyone complaining about "reverse racism" or "anti white racism" is a complete joke. like boo fucking hoo, someone called you a cracker on the internet, get over it.
That's a liberal with no framework. No one denies genocides (pro-tip just because the western media says it's a genocide doesn't make it a genocide.) Being so anti-racist you are the real racist is the Liberal Democratic party who elected a hard-core segregationist as president, not a Marxist Leninist. No one except people like you give a fuck about personal attacks. lol.
The “Uyghur genocide” is bullshit Atlanticist propaganda, and English-language Wikipedia is basically NATOpedia in its slant on the topic, so yes we will deny it. It’s a product of the new Cold War propaganda campaign against China.
More often than not, when Americans say leftist they really mean left-liberalism a la Bernie Sanders, which is really center-left at most, and not actually leftist in the original sense, a sense which Americans have forgotten thanks to two Red Scares and the first Cold War.
Lemmygrad isn't "hated" by most of the wider lemmyverse. There's just a loud and obnoxious minority of people that will rail and rant about lemmygrad. They loudly rant about lemmygrad because they aren't used to seeing their worldview get challenged and by its very nature as a radical leftist community, lemmygrad is a challenge to the typical background liberal perspective.
It's no surprise we all end up seeing a lot of threads about "those mean tankies at lemmygrad" (and hexbear too) made by people who can't take their worldview getting questioned, or even shown to be flawed, or just not standing up to their own scrutiny, and who get mad when that happens. There are also of course people with ideological reasons to demonize leftwing politics and will spread shit for that reason alone. But overall, I don't think most people care enough except to think "oh yeah that's that instance with those radical lefties, they're weird but they do make some great memes sometimes."
There's a difference between challenging other people's opinions and calling them fascists or Nazis just because they're not at the extreme left.
Even worse, in this very thread I've been called a fascist for the sole reason that my instance is sh.itjust.works, one of the bigger instances and one where your political opinion isn't a criteria to subscribe (especially not when I subscribed, they didn't even ask for an email!)
Yeah, I only joined shitjust works because that's where the cdda Lemmy is and that's the first thing I used it for, didn't even know people think it's a political instance. Though I guess with the hexbears and lemmygrads everything's political somehow. That's why I generally avoid dealing with them anyway.
I'm pretty left/lean socialist. The tankies that annoy me from those instances are pro authoritarian communists who say shit like "Stalin did nothing wrong" with no irony whatsoever. It's not really about bickering over ideological purity past a certain point, some of that shit makes a good case for the horseshoe theory
I could tell you, but the last time I responded to a thread like this I got banned for a couple weeks because toxic political personalities aren't very tolerant.
Nah that's about it. The majority of active users are disingenuous in any real way to anyone outside of thier toxic insider joke club. The whole "my personality is based on this political view" is a tiresome trope, regardless of what that view they actually have IRL.
Just like literally every other system ever devised or imagined. Ideas never work perfectly when people are involved, best never make the effort right?
Haven't seen any lemmygrad users in a while, but honestly the vitriol towards Hexbear is overblown. They're fine. Bit trolly, and they shitpost a lot, but it's kinda fun.
They're both good instances. People have been heavily propagandized to hate communists. You could make the kindest most welcoming space on the internet and if you put the label "communist" on it, it will be hated.