Imagine my surprise reading this on the LA Times this morning (emphasis mine):
“I would not acknowledge reproduction as a human right, but instead as a form of rape,” IndictEvolution wrote on Lemmy.World in July 2023. “I am also not bothered by infanticide as long as it is done humanely…”
Here is an archive of the article.
Here is his account.
It looks like he only stayed on Lemmy for about a month, most likely a temporary Reddit exile with the earliest exodus on June 2023. The article mentions threads on Reddit but doesn’t provide any quotes from there. User IndictEvolution on Reddit deleted their account, and the article makes it sound like they are referring to a different username that they don’t specify.
Hexbear is an interesting beast. It tends to be really insular because it is defederated by a lot of the bigger instances. But it does have a strong sense of community, and a lot of its own in-jokes. From the outside looking in, it often looks like a dumpster fire. But the reality is that it’s more like old 4chan, where it always looks like a dumpster fire on the surface… Then when you dig deeper and start understanding some of the memes, you realize it’s actually a really interesting community surrounded by a dumpster fire
Most people are mad at hexbear because their moderation policies are consequentialist not deontological and thus more stringent against stupid online shit. As a poster you don’t have a “right” to post on hexbear, however the community has a right to be protected. As such it’s one of the better places if you don’t want to read reams upon reams of lib coded bigotry.
Hexbear was its own thing for years before federating, that’s why it has a stronger site culture than most other instances. It’s unapologetically Communist, so those who are hostile to that quickly defederated from them once they started federating.
Lots of instances defederated because of the tendency to brigade. Since Hexbear was already a fairly large instance before federating, it meant it tended to dominate a lot of conversations on other instances. People have similar complaints about .world these days too. But fairly early in the first Reddit exodus, there were a few cases of Hexbear brigading smaller instances, and the Hexbear mods/admins clearly didn’t have any interest in stopping it. So not all of the defederation is purely politically based. Politics may have helped swing the decision, but it certainly wasn’t the only reason.
I don’t really think it’s brigading to participate on threads you’re federated with. If comments on threads federated with Hexbear are active, Hexbear users see them, and as Hexbear is a large instance, this appears as brigading, but is just a natural element of participation in federation. Some instances are hostile to Communists, so they didn’t want a bunch of Communists on every thread, so they defed.
Yeah. The “it was just because they hate communism” descriptions of hexbear defederation are just making up a story of oppression to explain why it wasn’t actually their behavior that got them locked out. People don’t hate communism, they hate trolling, tankies (in the literal sense with the Ukraine invasion), and brigading (referencing their fights with the libs and then a bunch of commenters swarming).
I could take or leave the lemmygrad defederation, but hexbear absolutely made its own bed.