I’ve seen the hexbears at work and don’t doubt that they’d class some of my views as woefully liberal but in the main I am enjoying being on a site where the left is so unapologetic, doesn’t go for all this centrist bollocks and is unafraid to call out bullshit.

Having seen the Overton window constantly shifted to a narrower aspect ratio and then shifted rightwards on reddit was a very disheartening experience and I think seeing active hexbears on all threads will be useful in stopping the uptight right when they inevitably decide that that the fediverse needs shifting towards their own Volkish views.

Russian disinformation is generally either refuted in comments or removed by mods

I mean all you have to do is glance at any Ukraine thread on any instance federated with hexbear to know this is a lie.

These people are trolls, plain and simple. The mods/admins are no exception, they are just slightly more self aware than their users when it comes to diplomacy. They will say whatever they think you want to hear in order to get one more day worth of trolling in.

Stating that my people (and other Baltic nations) are subhuman

As a member of Hexbear for 3+ years I just want to say that this isn’t acceptable over here and would land people with a very serious reprimand or a permaban if they don’t admit to being in the wrong for this. The use of “subhuman” in particular is fascist behaviour and I’d assume it is wreckers rather than longstanding members, it’s not language that socialists are fond of.

The only other thing I will say is that I genuinely appreciate that you’re building this community with your userbase and having these conversations, it’s the correct way to create a unique community culture and have people care about the space.

It was commonplace among leftists to oppose US military hegemony, NATO, and Raytheon pre-2022, even for relatively lib leaning spaces. This position became basically unacceptable if not bannable in so many left leaning spaces within a matter of months, which should scare you a lot more than the existence of one community where the sentiment has remained the same.

Well, bully for you for being even handed, but the instant I can block a complete server, hexbear and lemmygrad are going on it. The shit far outweighs the roses from either of those instances.

I feel a little sorry for the Lemm.ee users here that came to make measured, personal posts specific to the annoucement. There’s a fair amount of long off-topic arguements happening in bits of the thread now and that probably makes it harder to read and manage.

This is something that’s often been pointed to as a pure result of Hexbear users or federation with Hexbear and given rise to accusations of ‘brigading here and in the past’. While I don’t think every segue into debate has been useful here, and have also told comrades that I didn’t think this was the place for specific comments (which they removed) I also think there’s some important context to point out - and I hope it helps lemm.ee users wondering about all this traffic not to fall into the trap of assuming the worst based on a couple of comments:

• Hexbear is a very big and very active instance. A very small proportion of users posting in a thread (especially one explicitly about them) can seem like a lot to a lot of instances.
• Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes and Hexbear users do not have the ability to downvote posts or comments on other instances. This creates a culture where if people disagree, they tend to reply, not downvote instead. Another reason we’re very active.
• This thread has constantly been at the top of people’s feeds on Hexbear. if they’re not only set to ‘local’.
• Finally - and I say this fully acknowledging and appriciating the many ordinary, good faith, pleasant lemm.ee commenters that I’ve enjoyed reading and talking too even when I totally disagreed with them - a lot of these off-topic arguements and more heated comments do not come from nowhere. While not at all the majority, I do see a pretty shocking amount of actively hostile, hateful, and insulting behaviour here. Sadly, quite a bit of it would be banned under Hexbear’s moderation policy against things like slurs and hate speech too.

So try to keep in mind if you see salty Hexbear users replying to people that, just in reading through this thread myself, I’ve the following instances of abuse or smears against my comrades (and they continue popping up). So I absolutely support them defending themselves (as long as they stay within the rules here):

• Dimissal as the pejorative “tankie” - 4 times (although we actually think this one is pretty funny usually)
• Users stating that Hexbear users are propagandists - 8 times
• Stating that people from Hexbear are specifically paid Russian/Chinese bots/propagandists - 10 times
• Direct equivalences of Hexbear posters to Nazis or just straight up calling us Nazis/fascists - 7 times
• Insults regarding mental health or IQ that would be classed as ablism on Hexbear - 8 times
• Dismissing users as children - 2 times
• Claiming Hexbear users are using vote-manipulation (impossible, as explained above) - 4 times
• Accusations of deliberate brigading rather than just commenting, being active - 11 times

I’ve tried not to count repeated instances from the same users. But sadly that’s not all. Just a handful of the following are comments that have been made against Hexbear users in this thread, without any kind of equal hostility. As far as I can tell they all still remain:

• “You guys are like cancer”
• “Braindead fucking tankies”
• “Get fucked”
• “Asshole” (multiple)
• That our beliefs are “moralistic bullshut”
• That some of our beliefs are “a criminal ideology”
• A comment that simply states “No Russians”
• That we’re “evil” (multiple times)
• An elaborate comparison to us “vandalising a Jewish graveyard” and other Nazi equivalences
• And of course a comment that explictly minimised the Nazi death toll with glee, seeming to imply they should have killed more. On the subject of disagreeing with equating the hammer and sickle to the swastika (hidden with spoiler tag, for those who don’t want to see it repeated)…

There’s also been numerious instances of users misgendering Hexbear users. I’m not going to put all of these down to malice, but at Hexbear we display our pronouns for a reason - we love our trans comrades! You don’t have to, but could you please at least respect them and not misgender them?

Again, this isn’t the majority, but it’s honestly disappointing and worth keeping in mind amongst some of the louder, minority yells of ‘brigading’ etc.

I understand the tension between the communists and the anti-communists here (and that’s not going to be resolved in this thread), but the most baffling perspective in this thread are the people just wanting instance blocking. Why are you browsing All and then being upset that it’s full of posts from outside your normal bubble? Lemmy’s All filter is just like r/all: a mess of wildly different people, interests, and viewpoints. That’s kinda the point, isn’t it?

Lemmy provides subscriptions to specific communities based on your personal interests. That’s going to have the most relevance to you. Settings in every app allow you to pick it as the default view. Use the community explorer to find new communities that actually interest you.

In either case, the focus on instance seems weird. Lemmy is deliberately built around communities. It shouldn’t matter where your Lemmy account is hosted: you can subscribe/lurk/participate/ignore any community regardless. It seems like instances are more of an implementation/infrastructure detail. Anytime we start deliberately filtering/censoring/breaking the infrastructure, the more useless it becomes. Defederation actively undermines the network effect that makes Lemmy compelling.

I usually enjoy the conversations they create, could do less with the poopy pig but that’s not a big deal enough to defederate IMO.

I think the federation should be able to handle some more trolls if there’s also some genuine conversations to be had.

My instance has both Lemmygrad and Hexbear federated and I’d like it to stay that way.

My Instance, that was already defederated from Hexbear, shows around 300 comments right now. Watching this from lemmy.world, that’s also defederated from Hexbear, shows a similar number.

Looking directly from the lemm.ee instance, this thread has 1300 comments. Whooping 1k difference. I wonder what that could mean? 🙃

Edit: Just to proof my statement:

• https://feddit.de/c/[email protected]
• https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]
• https://lemm.ee/c/meta

I specifically chose lemm.ee because I want to moderate my own experience to a large degree. I’d more support defederating from from spammy instances like lemmit.online which just repost threads from Reddit.

Defederating is the wrong move.

I had to use Connect to block both Hexbear and Lemmygrad. On any political topic, I see a normal discussion for a few hours, and then when the brigade starts, my inbox fills with “This comment blocked using an instance filter for Hexbear” and if I show the comments, they’re almost universally negative and abusive.

I support any effort to restrict that instance. Chapos and tankies don’t play nice with others. They use their supposed support of LGBT rights and leftist initiatives to infiltrate and disrupt left spaces and undermine reasonable discourse, turning the conversation to acrimony and sometimes even bigotry.

Everything in this post describing your choice, to me affirms that I have found the right instance to make home. Thank you for your transparency and sharing how your background influences your perspective. Thank you for engaging in healthy reasonable discourse with those using the hammer and sicle (not a communist, but discussion of political ideologies is important and shouldn’t be censored). The ways and places where you chose to draw the line show, to me, a lot of integrity and I greatly appreciate and admire your willingness to engage with perspectives other than your own while remaining intolerant of bigotry- I think that balance is something perhaps everyone could aspire to doing better.

For my two cents- soon lemmy overall will have the option for accounts to defederate as they please, giving a good option to those who would like to avoid this community. I support the decision to stay federated, and I support lemmy adding more tools for users to moderate what they want to be exposed to.

I really appreciate that this instance generally favors letting me filter out what I don’t want to see for myself instead of making that choice for me. I just moved from lemmy.world and I really appreciate the transparency in communication, and the focus on remaining federated with other communities. Thanks for facilitating this community space!

Yeah, I generally agree with your stance on it, which is a little bit of a change from previously, but more so understanding better what was already there.

My main problem with their instance is the sub-group of more antagonistic and condescending users, which have an overlap with the ones posting what you’ve described as “Kremlin propaganda”.

Although said propaganda isn’t quite exclusive to Russia, there’s also Chinese propaganda stuff there too from what I can understand, which again has that same sort of overlap in users, if not the same users as the Russian propaganda sources.

Also, some of the culture of the instance is a bit off-putting, namely the allusions of sorts to pigs, but that could just be my Autism causing me to feel more offended by that than normal.

As it is, politically speaking, I’m not fond of Capitalism, I’m aware of the general historical problems of authoritarianism that have taken over what attempts at communism have been tried, and so I can agree with a decent amount of the views taken there.

But the pro-Russian stuff that shows up there is absolutely wild to me; a country so actively hostile to LGBTQIA+, and yet it’s getting support from people in an instance that is inclusive to that same persecuted group? The same country that doesn’t even appeal to their ideals of leftism and/or communism in modern day? And the same country that blatantly commits to violations of human rights? It doesn’t make any logical sense.

So to your point, it’s a moderation issue mainly, and an issue that actually is being addressed, so nicely done to the admins/moderators there for that, and well done to you for bringing that to attention here as well.

And hopefully as you’ve said, once people start getting used to the rules and connection to other instances, said antagonism, condescension, and trolling will reduce with time.

And apologies for the absolutely flowing sentences that go on for way longer than normal, I blame the Autism/ADHD, as it’s closer to how I actually speak vocally. I try to space it out so it’s more readable, and less of a wall of connected language that blurs together, especially for those who might have dyslexia.