I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.
Unless they start brigading heavily or cross a line in terms of the communities they house, we won’t be defederating them.
Their own communities are, quite something, but their admins have told them to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance, and so far, they seem to be doing that
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem. They can’t seem to help themselves with the brigading and they do seem to be drowning out local opinion with tankie rhetoric and spam.
EDIT: Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
EDIT 2: I was initially pretty excited about federating with hexbear but I think after seeing the effect it has on the overall tone of discussion I’m pretty disappointed.
Not having downvotes does not, by any means, mean you need to post your disagreement. Our instance also does not have downvotes. You ARE drowning out exactly the sort of discussion this community is for. I can guarantee what you would like to say has already been posted and upvoting those posts and moving on IS the appropriate way to handle this issue in a meta community for an instance you are not a part of.
Tend to agree.
I mean, i’d rather have this conversation with their input.
And yes, they have opinions. Opinions with which I often disagree. But recently my largest annoyance on Lemmy has been the “why are you intolerant towards bigots” contingent, not the hexbears.
Have you been in the news communities of late? Any time Russia/Ukraine comes up they’re flooding it with Russian apologia and silly emoticons.
Yeah the “whAt AbOuT UkraInian FASciSm” thing is pushed really hard over there.
to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance
They weren’t in Lemmy.ca, got defederated for shitposting, and being trolls over there.
Yep. Excessive spam of the pig poop emojis, brigades and harassing people. Shadow made the right choice kicking them out
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This aged poorly lol
I stand with and support whatever you choose to do. I just thought I’d bring it up. Thanks for all you do!
My only complaint is the popularity might be crashing our instance lol, but they are cool.
I defederated my instance.
I thought lemmy.ca’s justification pretty compelling. They are self-avowedly more interested in trolling, harassing other users, and crapping on other people’s politics. They don’t even make a secret of it.
It’s unfortunate because they do seem really queer and queer-friendly. But they seem to be totally uninterested in doing anything other than dunking HARD on anyone to the right of Lenin. So… passing on seeing that, personally.
They’re the kind of far-left types the rest of us should avoid being associated with because they ruin all of our image in the long run.
Nah get the hell out of here with that noise. Respectability politics is a dumb fucking game. The amount of times a cis queer person has told me as a trans person that I’m making the queer movement look bad is too high to count.
Fine, continue to act like a bunch of ten year olds hopped up on E numbers and a copy of Das Kapital and see how far that gets you in this world.
Are you daft? I’m not a hexbear user. Also, you’re a lemm.ee user and your opinion isn’t wanted or needed in this thread. Piss off.
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Yes, seems reasonable to me!
Hexbear is really queer friendly and polite. It’s also one of the few actual leftist spaces on here after the homogenization of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml. The main goal I’ve interpreted from Blahaj.zone is to be a queer-first and affirming space on Lemmy, so one has to prove that Hexbear is a large enough systemic threat to Blahaj’s members to warrant defederating.
I don’t think I’d describe hexbear as polite, they seem to get pretty rowdy, even antagonistic at times. Otherwise I agree though. It would be a shame to cut off one of the largest queer friendly instances out there.
Yeah, Hexbear is old Chapo, they left Reddit for Lemmy years ago. Because honestly, ChapoTrapHouse was a problematic community sometimes.
As someone else said, how are they queer friendly when they vehemently support anti-LGBTQ+ countries?
They also support Cuba, a nation with the most queer affirming family code in the entire world.
China has slowly been making life easier for queer people in the same fashion as the US (slow, very gradual changes decriminalization for example)
By this logic the EU is explicitly anti-queer because Poland is an EU member state which houses the most regressive policies in the entire world (“lgbt-free zones”) Yet Poland is not sanctioned, nor cut off from the EU.
The US has hundreds of anti-trans bills and the supreme court recently struck down legal protections for queer people (this case was also entirely fabricated to game the court system). Florida exists.
Not to mention the solidarity we should show to queer people across the globe. Pinkwashing history is not a solution.
Poland should be ousted from the EU for it’s horrid treatment of queer people, and the US is a strange mix since it’s mostly up to each state, and some states are horrible fucking cesspits that should not be supported in anyway (looking at you Florida).
If they only supported Cuba that would be okay. But China and Russia, fuck no.
It’s not “support” however. It’s just a discussion and news outlet for what’s happening outside of the direct US sphere of influence with like minded communists. My point being is that you can rarely pick and choose countries because queer liberation is always ongoing and multifaceted.
In any case, this isn’t grounds for defederation in my opinion. Simply block the communities as you see them or don’t engage.
Wait, how does Poland have the most regressive policies in the entire world when there are countries with the death penalty for LGBT people? Maybe they have the worst policies in Europe, but Hungary, Russia and Türkiye seem equally as regressive, if not more.
My issue isn’t with their takes or politics. My issue is the vibe. Maybe it’s because I’m older, and I want to have maybe an actual conversation with someone without having to deal with comments that consist of a pig pooping.
To be clear, when I said that it feels like t_d, I didn’t mean the political takes. I meant the edge lording and name calling. Granted, it’s mostly in their own community, but if you look at some of the behavior of their users here you’ll see what I’m talking about, and it’s leaked into other communities too.
I thought this was a bit overkill, because they seemed well behaved for the most part, although a bit annoying every now and then. But this comment section shows exactly why we probably should. They’re so combative and seem to completely dominate the discussion.
Yeah, I came into this thread expecting to defend letting blahaj be federated with hexbear, but I’m left seeing a comment section being armwrestled by hexbear users, when this post should really be predominantly blahaj users weighing in on the pros and cons, and the impact of hexbear onto our instance.
Checking this thread from an instance that has defederated hexbear is a wildly different experience.
Yeah, I logged on to my lemmy.world account to see a more local discussion… which is ironic.
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I might have to try that just to see lmao.
Here’s the view from over on slrpnk
Jesus, I didn’t realize that meant solarpunk. That’s not exactly a healthy sign, and neither is the fact I feel significantly less want to defed reading that version of the thread than this one.
Hexbear has a reputation for brigading. They do this intentionally to deny everyone else a platform and shut down any real discussion. They aren’t here to talk in good faith.
Yup.
It can often get tense with them and I don’t agree with some of their takes, but they are definitely a voice to consider seriously and worth arguing (in a polite way) with.
Unlike those conservative right echo chambers, most of them are actually educated, historically literate and smart, and they actually provide sources for their claims instead of hand waiving and using every falacy in the book.
The problem is that they are in support of regimes which are currently or historically anti LGBT+. There is no further discussion to be had. Even if they claim to be whatever, they are against us. Their ideology is incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives.
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+. You would fight against that for the same reason you fight against Nazis. The ecological politics or so are irrelevant at this point. Even if you agree with that, don’t forget that they want us gone.
This is so close to the Nazi bar problem and I fully understand why defederation might be the best course of action. Personally I don’t know what the right call is, but I blocked the instance using the Connect app anyway.
This is a good way to put it and one of the reasons I’m so perplexed about how queer the instance is. I genuinely don’t understand how LGBTQ+ people can simp for regimes that simply want to/wanted to murder them.
And before someone jumps in with “but America/the West/liberals are trying to do the same thing”… if you don’t think it’s easier being queer in the US, even with all the problems, than in Russia or North Korea, I just don’t know what to tell you.
That’s… not the kind of debating I’ve seen them do, but sure. As far as reasonable debate goes: if you have to brigade and spam, you’ve already lost. What exactly the message was just doesn’t matter.
I’ve had some interesting and insightful conversations with people from Hexbear for the last few days. However, we did reach a point where people from Hexbear started defending the Taliban and North Korea. There are tankies on Hexbear. Probably a lot of them. It’s something people should know.
They aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be but some of them really are too combative. I’ve seen them get into arguments with people for not being the correct type of left I don’t know how to respond to them because I’m not a polisci or world history major.
I’m also pretty tired of those huge emojis. The pig butt thing was funny maybe once. I don’t know what the right answer is I’d just wish they would chill.
Some of the users takes on the CCP are garbage, but a few garbage opinions doesn’t warrant defederating.
Edit: You know what on second thought let’s defederate. There are a lot of tankies shilling for countries that hate the lgbtq.
And the excessive brigading.
On the one hand I am not mad to have different ideologies here but they seem to go out of their way to pick fights which is pretty grating for what is supposed to be a memey, supportive community. Also whenever someone points out a one negative thing about a communist country they seem to counter it by saying a western country did the same/worse, which isn’t wrong but doesn’t address the point? If they could just accept a fault here or there it would go a long way in seeming less aggressive.
The problem is, they’re not actually arguing in good faith. They’re here to call people neolibs, spam, and pick fights. It’s not about ideology, it’s about a group of people who only want to cause trouble.
I mean I’ll admit my bias as a politically-minded leftist, but I like them. I don’t agree with all their takes, but it feels like a positive way to poke some holes in the echo chamber a bit.
I had never heard of that instance before opening this thread and ooh boy do I wish I hadn’t. I have known these kinds of people for a long time, I’ve been these kinds of people (for a thankfully brief period). Just in this thread there are hexbear users doing the usual tank schtick of goading people into political discussions and calling them neolibs. I can see why some might view them as a neutral or even positive place to have around given their apparent progressivism towards queer people and their mod team being largely trans, but I really don’t think that really makes any difference. You can slap some pride flags on it all but ultimately if you drill down deep enough into the beliefs of any group that proudly calls themselves Marxist Leninist you’re going to find some truly ugly shit. And it’s not just the obvious stuff like having to hear how progressive Cuba is, the stances they take on oppressive regimes always leads to some kind of war crimes/genocide/ethnic cleansing denial, and where they’re self aware enough to not outright deny they will deflect. I can see why from the perspective of queer western people this might all seem a bit esoteric because a lot of them will attempt to dance around the issues but they are there and a lot of people with familial connections to this stuff that do see it for what it is. And before any of their users get excited I’m not going to engage with your shit, I’ve seen you, I’ve been you, I know your shit and I don’t fuck with it. If you just scroll through here you can see the neolib name-calling and tankie memeing/totally ironic (probably) propaganda, they have zero self control. The blue and pink ain’t fooling me.
Hexbear is widely old Chapo. They’re an odd bunch, but honestly I’d defed Lemmy.world long before Hexbear was in sigh.
they’ve become to large to defeterate
Says who? They get widely defederated, no one would stay.
They were the largest lemmy instance around before reddit happened, and that was without federation.
Ffs I was a long time /r/chapotraphouse user and even tried to use the website after the sub got banned (nothing against it even, just didn’t really have enough of my interests to really keep me) But y’all gotta admit this is pretty fucking embarrassing. Like this is a instance meta post on a pretty small, very explicitly pro trans leftist instance, do ANY of you think you would have actually been defederated in the first place? Like genuinely, do you not think you would’ve just had people like me say “naw they’re chill”. But instead you put an odd couple hundred comments on this thread when the biggest in the little bit, has about 40? And get this, it’s also a thread a defedding from an instance, but actually deserved it, and our admin had already been on the case? Embarrassing.
Big time edit: This was the comment I had originally typed out, and while I still believe quite a bit of it, I’m kinda disgusted by the amount of Russia apologia and pro war sentiment generally. But let me guess, I must be pro nato?
I’m kinda disgusted by the amount of Russia apologia and pro war sentiment generally.
Where are you seeing this. Do you have links? I’ve seen people mentioning this a lot but have never seen any of this content personally.
Hexbear leans meme-tankie but on the flipside they’re very supportive of queer people. I don’t agree with them on everything, but I don’t feel unwelcome there either, so I personally disagree with both defederation and the comparison to T_D.
It’s not their political stance or my agreement or disagreement I think makes them like t_d. It’s the general vibe of most things I’ve come across. It’s a vibe that’s very edge-lord. Like “if you’re offended by me talking about that’s you’re problem” kind of vibe.
FWIW, I’m very leftist and actually agree with a lot of the stances I see on there, which makes it worse. I pop open a comment section and go “oh goddamnit” and block another community.
I’ve had only very positive interactions with hexbear users. They definitely have their own vibe within their communities from being unfederated for a while, but I don’t see why that is a reason to defederate. If you don’t like hexbear comments sections then just… don’t open them??? Do you even want to be in the fediverse?
It’s more that they bring that behaviour out into other communities and make them unappealing. Several news communities become unusable if certain topics come up since they federated.
