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.

  • @gk99@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    31 year 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.

    • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️A
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year 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.

    • @natebluehooves@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      41 year 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
        link
        fedilink
        English
        -11 year ago

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

        • @natebluehooves@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year 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 ✡️✝☪️A
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        If they’re going to do nothing but troll and be toxic, then unfortunately it’s necessary. I also feel strongly that excessively defederating or banning visitors from the entire instance harms the fediverse. Instance bans and defederation should be used when instances have shown that they can’t be relied on to communicate meaningfully outside their instance.

  • @awwwyissss@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    21 year 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.

      • @awwwyissss@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        -11 year 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.

    • Nerd02OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      01 year 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

    • r3df0x ✡️✝☪️A
      link
      fedilink
      English
      11 year 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.

    • @Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      1 year 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.

      Tl;dr: Ban all shilling, astroturfing, and organized propaganda peddling.

  • @catfish@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    -11 year 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.

  • @RobotToaster@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2
    edit-2
    1 year ago

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

    • Nerd02OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      -11 year ago

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

  • @Floey@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    01 year ago

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