If so, was it polled somewhere?

  • cacheson@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    So I was just looking through literature.cafe a bit, and came across this excellent comment chain by Janvier. It outlines the history and culture of Hexbear, and makes a very solid argument for defederating them.

    TL;DR- Don’t defederate Hexbear because they’re a bunch of genocide-apologist authoritarians. Defederate them because they’re annoying, and will burn out your moderators.

    • relative_iterator@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Personally I think it’s an extremely toxic community that represents the worst of the internet. They’re extremely set in their ways and provide no meaningful content or discussions on the platform. That’s totally fine for them but they can do whatever they want in their own safe space.

      I would prefer them to be defederated mostly because I can’t block an entire instance.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        I would prefer them to be defederated mostly because I can’t block an entire instance.

        This is in development, fingers crossed it could even come in the next version of lemmy.

      • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Could you fucking not? If they annoy you, block them. If they don’t break any rules and you report them anyways, the only thing you’ll achieve is annoying SJW moderators. At that point, you’ll get banned before Hexbear gets defederated.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          As a moderator in a different community, please DO report all malicious comments posted wherever they are

          Moderators with a brain understands the purpose of the “I wasn’t born yesterday rule”

        • ZodiacSF1969@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Are you a mod?

          I suspect they are coordinating to boost their comments in other communities/instances. Their fringe political views are always highly upvoted, I just find it suspicious. Many places have rules against brigading, so where I suspect it I will report it.

          Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right. But I still think it’s good to communicate to the mods/admins that a lot of users do not like hexbear because they are disruptive in every community they visit.

    • yata@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      A bit misleading description of CTH on reddit, because they most certainly developed their obnoxious behaviour and jargon already back then, and they did very little to combat racism and fascism there precisely becuase their obnoxious behaviour was counter-productive to such goals (also there were other subreddits far more active and useful in combating fascism and bigotry on reddit such as r/againstallhatesubreddits, which did actual work on deplatforming fascists).

      But other than that it is an apt description of their behaviour here and why they pose such a problem for lemmy in general.

    • Mr_Buscemi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I commented on here already about our instances interaction with hexbear. It’s a disaster that led to somehow them defedarating from Blahaj for being not safe for their LGBT members even tho Blahaj is like one of the most accepting instance for LGBT people. Many of us were trying to ask our admin to defederate from them because those on our instance felt unsafe. Felt like a “no u” moment they tried to pull before we defederated them for not being safe for our members lol.

      Then Blahaj started getting spammed by a new user who was calling a bunch of trans users anti trans. They also said our admins was anti trans even though she was openly trans. Then that user began spamming across lemmy how Blahaj and it’s admin were anti-trans and should not be visited.

      Also saw that user get a Blahaj user banned from lemmy.world even though nobody in that discussion was commenting on an lemmy.world community. It has a lot of shit so everything below is just that story.

      What happened was another trans Blahaj user commented on a post on some 3rd instance and the OP of that post basically said “I know your reputation from elsewhere and your comment here proves your anti-trans reputation”. The Blahaj user went wtf and then realized the OP was one of those commenting on the original trolls post and was basically saying the Blahaj user was anti trans. The Blahaj user was rightfully pissed and accused the OP of being an alt of that troll since they wrote in the same style as the original troll (I honestly was feeling the same as I read it all). The OP wouldn’t reply and just stuff like " I refuse to reply to you" or “please don’t talk to me” or “I respectfully ask you to not engage with me”. It all felt trollish since that OP was the only who started the argument and now refused to engage after starting.

      After the 3rd attempt at an reply , a lemmy.world admin came in saying that if the Blahaj user replied one more time to OP then they would be permanently banned from all of lemmy.world. Keep in mind this wasn’t even on lemmy.world and the whole thing started because OP insulted a trans user by stating they were anti-trans. The Blahaj user was still pissed since she got insulted for saying she has the reputation of somebody who would hate everything she was and replied again. The original troll from way earlier came to the post & replied to her and tagged the lemmy.world admin saying they needed to be banned for being a chaser and replying after being told not to. Then the Blahaj user got banned.

      It still feels so fucked that a lemmy.world admin would step into that 3rd instance and threaten the Blahaj user with loss of access to the biggest lemmy instance if she didn’t ignore being called an anti-trans. It really helped show me the short comings of lemmy since every instances admin will probably just take what a user from their instance state as fact and ignore the other person.

      Sorry for that long comment. It’s just that I saw how hexbear will twist words in their favor like with claiming Blahaj isn’t safe for their LGBT members and then strangely had new accounts show up calling trans Blahaj users as anti-trans and realized that it was just way too on the nose as where could these users have came from.

        • Mr_Buscemi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          We all laughed in Blahaj when they defederated first lol. It was so childish for them to block us for being unsafe right before we were about to do it lmfao. They tried so hard to change the narrative but it failed.

          I feel bad for any instance that has to deal with them in a daily bases. It makes scrolling through lemmy annoying unless you block every fucking community from them.

        • Draconic NEO@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Maybe we should encourage defederation from our end, that way we’ll be safe from them since if they defederate us they can change their mind whenever they want and go back to spamming us if they are bored.

  • SharkEatingBreakfast@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I don’t mind the general hexbear ideology in itself. Sure. You do you.

    But, damn, I see more than a few of its members just being obnoxious.

    • Shiggles@sh.itjust.works
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      It’d be lovely if you could just see the hexbear powerusers somewhere convenient and mass block. I went through a couple subreddits of theirs, found the top posts, blocked everyone with more than 50 upvotes. Real pain in the ass, but I suddenly have far fewer teenagers who peaked in middle school debate club to deal with.

  • Mr_Buscemi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    Sucks for you guys. They caused nothing but trouble when they were still federated with Blahaj.

    After so many of us complained about how they were being dicks and many on the instance weren’t feeling comfortable, hexbear decided to defederate from us first since they somehow said it wasn’t safe for their LGBT members to be on it.

    Funny enough a few days later a new account started posting across different lemmy instances for days about how the Blahaj instance was anti trans and that the admin was too. Our Admin is openly trans :/

    The whole argument started because the user said everything had to be political and wouldn’t stop insulting others who said they didn’t want to have every post on Blahaj to turn political.

    It was just too perfect timing how a few days after hexbear defedarated for somehow saying the pro LGBT instance was anti-LGBT, that we got a brand new account attacking trans members while sayin they were anti-trans.

    Enjoy your new people.

    • PM_ME_FAT_ENBIES@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Hey, you’re talking about me! Yes, I was repeatedly misgendered by a user who claimed to be apolitical. Yes, I warned the admins that this user was going to be transphobic and they did nothing. Yes, I believe that trans people are capable of transphobia, because not every trans person knows every single thing in the universe about being trans.

      • Mr_Buscemi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        Yeah the Blahaj admin they accused of being anti-trans was trans. They knew this too. The admin has talked to them in the original post that started it all and told the troll they were trans.

        The user 100% did it on purpose to insult the Blahaj admin and to then go across all of Lemmy and post how they were anti trans.

        I also saw that same user tag a Lemmy.world admin to tell them to ban a trans Blahaj user for being a chaser. Then the Blahaj user got banned even though nobody was commenting on a lemmy.world post. If you wanna read that long story then click this link to my other comment here. The 2nd half of my comment there is that long story.

        https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2503939

      • PM_ME_FAT_ENBIES@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        Trans people are capable of transphobia because not every trans person in the world knows everything in the world about trans issues.

  • Kes@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    They’re abrasive enough that they couldn’t even get along with lemmy.blahaj.zone, a dedicated LGBT friendly instance ran by several trans women, out of accusations of said admins being transphobic

    • Katzastrophe@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Also can’t forget them getting offended over /c/196 because they have a “no tankies” rule, which apparently is a slur for them

      • mycorrhiza they/them@lemmy.ml
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        196 is by far the main community on blåhaj, and their banner basically says “no hexbears.”

        Also, trans hexbear users gave examples where they were bothered by chasers in 196, and felt not enough mod action was taken to control chasers there. I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.

        • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.

          This accusation always confuses me. Blahaj zone was around for half a year before the reddit migration, long before 196 was on lemmy and we did fine without them. They’re here not because they wield crazy power, but because they’re a queer lead community, with a strong queer user base. That means they have a home with us, because creating spaces for communities like that is the reason Blahaj Lemmy exists in the first place

          The truth is, the hexbear admins asked me to talk to the 196 mod team and ask them to remove the “no tankies” rule, because hexbear users wanted to be part of 196. I told them to talk to the mods of the community directly, because I’m not going to force political opinions on a queer, trans fem lead community.

          The 196 mods rejected the hexbear request, and like that, the hexbear narrative changed, and suddenly their users no longer wanted to join 196, claiming that it is transphobic and unsafe. So either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request.

          Either way, part of their narrative change involved painting 196 as being both harmful and unassailable, with blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community.

          From my perspective, the biggest harm to trans people in all of this isn’t a trans fem lead community with politics that run counter to hexbear, but rather, the ongoing demonising and dogpiling of specific trans folk and trans communities by the hexbear community.

          I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat

          This is also an interesting part of the ongoing narrative. It’s not a co-incidence that I’m being painted as naïve; well meaning but ultimately ill equipped to deal with moderating a large community. It allows people to attack me without attacking me.

          The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.

          You can disagree with my choices, but the narrative that they are naïve and ill informed is simply a tool to trigger an emotional response in people, to develop sympathy for the hexbear claims, to undermine my perceived competence, without them having to outright demonise me.

          It’s a cheap tactic, and and a cheap tactic typically used to undermine women in positions of responsibility at that.

          • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksM
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            1 year ago

            The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.

            It shows. You’ve handled this saga admirably. As someone with none of that experience who has performed significantly worse in navigating this situation, I’m happy to know that there are people to lean on.

            Hexbear voted strongly in favor of federating with us and their admins assured us they would be well behaved. They immediately brigaded our main community and disrupted all local discussion for about 48 hours by spamming our communities, and then defederated from us, citing absolutely no evidence of misbehavior by our users in the defederation announcement. They claim ableist slurs, but considering they think the word “crazy” is an ableist slur… it rings somewhat hollow.

            It’s not even the politics that bothers me, despite the fact that they often take pointless, inflammatory positions. It honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space.

            When they see a user from another server make a good point against their narrative, they swarm like white blood cells fighting an infection, hurling a combination of invective and irrelevancy to prevent the cold hand of logic from penetrating their bubble. The discrepancy between their treatment of their own users and users from any other server (barring lemmygrad) is remarkable to witness.

            The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.

            I’m still very upset about this whole situation because I know chapos, I listened to the podcast, I frequented the subreddit. Back in 2016/7 I thought wow, the far left is making a bit of a comeback here in America, this could be the start of something.

            Then eventually reddit banned the subreddit and it seems that was all it took to dismantle that budding source of leftist activism. I guess I’m partially to blame, because I’m one of the many voices of reason that didn’t bother putting in the effort of joining a different site. Clearly, the extremists were the only ones who cared enough, and the 3 year isolation surely solidified that fact. The only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.

            And now they actively sequester themselves from… pretty much everybody, comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives. It’s extremely frustrating to know that thousands of potential comrades have been neutralized, and in fact are potentially being wielded like a bludgeon against real western leftists to blunt our ability to effectively collaborate and find common ground.

            • mycorrhiza they/them@lemmy.ml
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              comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives

              many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.

              it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space

              The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.

              Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There’s no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.

              That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.

              I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is “shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I’m not reading that.” “Genocide denier” — or, even less accurate, “genocide supporter” — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you’re an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.

              As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup’d by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.

              I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.

              The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it’s like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.

              Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.

              On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America’s real concern.

              continued:

              • mycorrhiza they/them@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.

                in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.

                Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?

                The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.

                I’m gonna gloss over the “genocide of westerners and white people” comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.

                You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don’t find it.

                https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

                Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press

                from the abstract:

                Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

                and from further down

                In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

                What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?

                Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it’s questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!

                America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America’s wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.

                Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change

                https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X

                Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices. Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.

                And that’s not mentioning the fucking wars.

                Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests

                There are open-air slave markets in Libya now. Great job, America.

          • mycorrhiza they/them@lemmy.ml
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            blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community

            that was me speculating, bridging the gap between my main points of information: 1) that I had seen trans hexbear users discussing chaser messages they had gotten, and complaining that there were too many chasers in 196, 2) that I had seen posts from you where it was obvious to me that you care and consider chasers to be a problem, and 3) that 196 was a lifeboat community and is larger than the rest of blahaj.

            If you’re happy with 196 how it is, then the three interpretations I see are 1) that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem, 2) that they have a lower tolerance for chaser behavior, or 3) that they have a lower threshold for what they deem to be chaser behavior — or some combination of the three.

            either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request

            Or it’s not all the same people, or their opinions changed. But I also think emotions were running high. I remember posts where hexbears were pretty upset that users on blahaj had accused them of pretending to be queer. There are also a lot of comments like that here, but I think it hurts a lot more coming from other queer people. Overall, I don’t think the situation brought the best out of anyone.

            • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem

              This is exactly what happened.

              The two instances that I am aware of.

              The first instance was a cis guy responding explicitly to a prompt from a trans person, talking about how their attraction to a non medically transitioned trans man wouldn’t work, precisely because he acknowledged that his attraction would be based on elements that would make the hypothetical trans man in question uncomfortable.

              This was not a cis person volunteering an opinion to trans folk unasked for. It was a cis guy responding to an explicit question from a trans person, whilst respecting trans identities and acknowledging the reality of dysphoria.

              The resulting discussion about that topic lead to a huge outbreak of transphobic commentary from external users. That lead to me making a post calling out the transphobia and aggressively banning anyone that crossed the line.

              This all happened months before hexbear joined, and the post from me addressing the issue is still visible in 196.

              It’s not an accident that this incident only became an issue for hexbear folk after the 196 mods refused to remove anti tankie political commentary at hexbear’s request.

              The second instance was a hexbear user reporting someone making chasery comments to them. I asked for details so I could ban the person in question. Before telling me who it was, the hexbear user asked me not to ban the account in question, because they looked like they were a newly out trans person that had taken a joke too far (they were calling people m’lady as a joke). In any case, I talked to the poster making the comments, and told them that it’s making people uncomfortable and they need to stop. They did (they already had before I messaged them)

              And that’s the “endemic” of chasers. A trans person making an ill conceived joke, and a single cis person answering a direct question from months ago.

              I can absolutely understand why some people would be uncomfortable with both of the events in question. But even allowing for that, what we have is two misrepresented events that were actively addressed at the time they occurred, one of which occurred months before hexbear even appeared on the scene.

              Again, it’s not an accident that most of the chasers hexbear are concerned about apparently hang out in 196, a community that hexbear users wanted to join until they found out they couldn’t. Only then did the chasers and transphobia appear in their narrative.

                • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                  1 year ago

                  The two additional incidents linked in there (in post 1 and 3), were both actioned by a moderator, the user spoken to, and the behaviour hasn’t been repeated. The one in your third link was aimed at me directly, not a hexbear user, and occurred before hexbear federated with us.

                  So, 4 events in total, 2 of which involved hexbear users, and 2 of which occurred before hexbear federated with us. All 4 of which received a moderator response and communication with the user, which stopped the behaviour in question.

                  Notably, 3 of the users accused of being chasers are trans, gender diverse or gender questioning themselves. And I’m not going to kick a trans person to the kerb for behaviour that can be addressed by talking to them.

      • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.ee
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        I’m transfemme, and I was repeatedly misgendered as a “guy” and a “dude” by a user I warned the admins was transphobic. They ignored the problem completely.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          Did you tell the user it bothered you?

          I’ll say “see you guys later” to a group of women without a second thought but if one said it bothered them I would stop.

    • jacaw@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      Thank you for being one of only two people in this thread that actually answered the question.

      • can@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        You’re welcome. Most people were too busy complaining. Sync just added instance browsing and earlier I happened to be curious enough to check hexbear and saw the thread discussing it. Couldn’t find it when I went back to look though.

  • MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works
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    Lol I blocked the most annoying posters from hexbear on this thread and now there’s hardly any comments. I think we should put them in time out. Like defederate for 15 days. if they keep brigading, another 15 days. I don’t really want to defederate, but I hate this kind of brigading.

  • bzz@sh.itjust.works
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    Pretty disappointing that @iamaqtpie is active on hexbear and says things like:

    Please direct any seething that you may wish to do to the struggle session that’s well underway over here.

    which reddit considered hate speech 🙄

    Also disappointing that hexbear gets to vote federation, while we are left to federate to hexbear without a choice because the admins like the instance. Lame.

    It’s clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it’s decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn’t this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn’t mean anything?

    • mycorrhiza they/them@lemmy.ml
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      which reddit considered hate speech 🙄

      here’s the whole quote, emphasis mine:

      Hexbear is a Lemmy server that was created about 3 years ago as a new home for the former users of r/chapotraphouse. CTH was banned from reddit because they were openly calling for the deaths of slave owners, which reddit considered hate speech 🙄

      Why would you take this out of context, and what is your issue with the whole quote?

      • That’s a highly suspicious use of a ban that I would like admin feedback on.

        While your take about decision making is slightly wrong…
        We’re federating with everything by default and use blocklists. Hexbear is fedetating with nobody by default and uses allowlists.
        Basically, no action has been made by local admins for this new federation to happen.
        We never had to defederate them before because they weren’t fedetating with us.

        The next step would be discussion then vote in the agora. I expect defederation to take a bit more than a week if the process hasn’t changed too much since last time.

        That said, your comment isn’t anywhere near ban worthy and is a really bad optics on whichever mod was involved in that.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      It’s clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it’s decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn’t this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn’t mean anything?

      Make your own instance then, or move to another. That’s the lemmy solution.

      Lemmy isn’t about having each instance be its own democracy, lemmy is about having lots and lots and lots of instances forming one massive network. These will always be privately owned by the people hosting them, so it’s ultimately up to them how they run their shop. However, the barrier to entry is relatively low, so you can quite easily host your own and be on exactly the same footing.

      If you want to talk about community, then that’s literally what lemmy has instead of subreddits. That’s where the users make the rules. Granted, there aren’t sufficient mod tools to properly deal with anything - maybe when they introduce user-level instance blocking (coming soon ^TM ) they’ll also give us community-level instance blocking.

    • 🐱TheCat@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      bad take, we are voting right now in agora about this. Are you ignorant of it or just shit stirring?

  • wtvr@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    This is such bullshit. Just saw the announcement that we aren’t going to defederate from hexbear. Why weren’t we given a say in this?

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksM
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      The announcement didn’t say that we weren’t going to defederate. It said in the immediate future. If this proves to be untenable, we will have a vote.

      • yata@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Don’t you think their behaviour in this very thread is very clear evidence that your beliefs that they are a “positive for this society” is completely unfounded?

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksM
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          I think some of them are okay and some of them suck. Much like our own users.

          There is clear evidence of that fact throughout this thread.

          • Nima@sh.itjust.works
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            but if the majority of users are saying they don’t want hexbear to be federated with this instance, you’d respect the users. right? 😥

            • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksM
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              Of course. I simply figured that in order to decide whether or not we want to be federated, we would first have to experience what federation was like. That appears to be a very controversial assumption, but I stand by it.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Is there a straightforward way to go through and block all communities on hexbear? I browse All but would like to avoid accidentally commenting on any of their posts.

    • 50MYT@aussie.zone
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      1 year ago

      Sync can do it

      Filter comment and posts from the entire instance.

      It’s great.

      • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        Seems like a good option for mobile users. I don’t do social media stuff on mobile though, so I guess I’m stuck just blocking them as I see them for now.

        • can@sh.itjust.works
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          There are alternative desktop frontends. Maybe one of those will add it.

  • Ghyste@sh.itjust.works
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    I appear to be out of the loop. What’s wrong with hexbear? I’m not familiar with the instance.

    • UnknownQuantity@lemm.ee
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      They’re just an annoying bunch of wannabe communists who sound incredibly smug and post a ton of stickers in comments. Having said that I’ve moved to lemm.ee when lemmy.world defeterated from hexbear.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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      I had some conversations here. They were saying that north Korea is a lovely democracy, Russia is totally justified in Ukraine, and China isn’t doing anything to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Just some examples from yesterday.

        • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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          They’re coming here. They’ve all got their pronouns after their names, (which is actually a great idea) so it’s a little easier to tell them apart. I’ve got a useless thread with a few in memes@lemmy.ml right now.

          • sapient [they/them]@sh.itjust.works
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            It’s frustrating, because I have pronouns after my name and I dislike hexbear… a lot. It is a good idea to have users give pronouns and automatically attach it.

            Their behaviour has made me constantly check if people with pronouns after their names are part of hexbear before engaging in any threads, because of the stress of dealing with them :/, sometimes I do engage anyway and immediately regret it /shrug

            It is depressing, because normally using pronouns like this indicates trans supportiveness so I feel better about conversing with people with them on their names. Hexbear has ruined this because of their behaviour around all other topics and sometimes trans topics.

            Just hope Jerboa gets instance-blocking features soon ;p, then I can block them on both my lemmy accounts .

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksM
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      What’s insulting about “struggle session”? I will concede that it was dismissive, because I was dismissing demands for immediate defederation, which contradicts our decision making process.

      • Ehhh… I’ll try to assume the best here and just quote what Wikipedia has to say on struggle sessions.
        If you read that and still think that’s an apt choice of words, then… idk? yikes?

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

        Struggle sessions or denunciation rallies were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being “class enemies” were publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by people with whom they were close. Usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, “students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, [and] children were manipulated into exposing their parents”. Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support. The aim was to instill a crusading spirit among the crowd to promote the Maoist thought reform. These rallies were most popular in the mass campaigns immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution.

        Regardless of where one stands on this particular topic, I don’t think this is a term we should ever want associated with anything, let alone our vote discussion threads?

        The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.
        Dismissal, and implying the discussion is a sham, coming from someone in a position of power… I mean yea, that’s kind of insulting? — not to me, but to the ideals of this place and the agora.

        I can’t really know your intent, and while I prefer to assume the best, it’s not really a good look.

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksM
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          I apologize. I acquired that term from hexbear users within the past month and I hoped to send them some kind of signal that our server was receptive to their users and not immediately hostile. Unfortunately, they still chose to be immediately hostile, so that didn’t work out. I was not aware of the derivation of the term, I thought it was just a zoomer term for a thread where people were flaming each other.

          It actually gives me great relief to know that there is a reason why people were so upset about that term, and yet it also makes me ashamed of myself.

          The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.

          I completely agree. My assumption at the time was that the discussion was yet to unfold, and the thread I was linking was merely a flame war with no productive outcome. Which is technically true.

          I shouldn’t have used that term without researching what it means, and I probably shouldn’t have agreed to federate with hexbear in the first place. But I wanted to give them a chance, because I believe in leftist ideals and I hoped they could help us.

          Honestly at this point I feel like just leaving Lemmy entirely, because I’m trying to guide this community and it’s just an uphill battle that I will never win. Things have gotten distinctly more tedious in the past month, and I was hoping hexbear could inject new life into the rest of Lemmy. Now, I worry about whether there even is a viable path to relevancy for us.

          I appreciate the fact that at least you gave me the benefit of the doubt, unlike many others.

  • TheThirdAccount@kbin.social
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    OK, first time I’ve seen the dread Hexbear brigading in action. So, thanks, I guess?

    Now I understand why they warrant defederation. I’m glad on on a Lemmy instance that defederated them, and suppose I’l have to find a kbin instance that does as well (apparently this one doesn’t defederate them if I’m reading this correctly?)

    The irony is that, although I’ve been in the fediverse a while, today I literally made my first kbin account.

    • Katzastrophe@feddit.de
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      This post was created by someone from the sh.itjust.works instance.

      Do a CTRL+F search for Hexbear Accounts, if you can’t find any, your instance is defederated from them