Lots of people who are seeing top-level postings about Hexbear. Net are probably confused about what has been going on and I want to give an SRD-style overview of the whole thing.
Note: As a user of Blahaj.Zone, I am not a neutral party in this and I do not pretend to be. This is how the whole thing has played out from my perspective.
Hexbear. Net is another Lemmy instance that had relatively recently started to federate with Blahaj.Zone and other Lemmy instances. It had previously been known as Chapo.Chat because it began as an instance for fans of the podcast ChapoTrapHouse.
Recently users from Blahaj.Zone (as well as other Lemmy instances) began to complain about the behavior of Hexbear users. The complaints were about rude, obnoxious behavior: Hexbear users calling people “libs” as an insult, denying crimes of Russia and China, denying the crimes of Stalin,…
Such behavior was not necessarily forbidden on Blahaj.Zone, but certain sub-Lemmys had their own rules on these subjects.
One of the threads about Hexbear: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1854795?scrollToComments=true
After an ever increasing number of users calling for defederating from Hexbear. Net, Ada (admin of Blahaj.Zone) opened a thread to talk about it. The thread was quickly inundated with Hexbear users, complaining in turn about being called out in this way. Though many of their comments exploited a current bug in the Lemmy code which resulted in emoji’s being embedded as pictures which results in lots of image spam.
Ada responded by removing top-level comments in the thread which were not from Blahaj.Zone’s users, because she wanted to get the feedback of her own community, not from anybody else.
This happened originally in this thread: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1959801
The discussion on Blahaj.Zone was a back and forth: Lots of people calling for “leftist and queer unity”, others complaining about getting harassed by Hexbear users.
Meanwhile, elsewhere: Lemm.ee, a Lemmy instance operated and managed by someone from Estonia, also opened a discussion about Hexbear - at least partially motivated by the admin’s increasing unease of the rampant denial of soviet atrocities and the occupation of Estonia by the Soviet Union. Russian propaganda in regards to the war in Ukraine was also an issue.
Lemm.ee was largely encountering similar problems as Blahaj.Zone, though the Lemme.ee admin admitted that the Hexbear admin was generally responsive to reports and complaints.
The thread on Lemm.ee: https://lemm.ee/post/4543536
The thread was also flooded with comments from Hexbear users. The admin of Lemm.ee also responded by hiding most of the comments from Hexbear.
https://mastodon.social/@brooklynman/110911292961470110
Back on Blahaj.Zone, a tangent opens up: A Hexbear user complains about c/196, the new home of Reddit’s r/196 which had relocated to Blahaj.Zone and has been its biggest community ever since. The Hexbear user complains about their comments being removed, comments that called out the use of the r-word and other call-outs. The user posts pictures of the removal notices.
Blahaj.Zone’s admin Ada steps in and intervenes on behalf of the Hexbear user, having a stern word with the c/196 mod responsible for the removal of the comments.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2136643
A Hexbear admin also gets involved and sends a message to the mods of c/196 demanding the removal of the sub-Lemmy’s banner, because it contains “fuck tankies²”, arguing that tankies is a slur. The c/196 mod refuses and publishes their message.
[²"Tankies" is a pejorative term for authoritarian socialists in the vein of Stalin and/or Mao.]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1961004
While the discussion if Blahaj.Zone should defederate from Hexbear is still ongoing, the Hexbear admins defederated from Blahaj.Zone without warning from their side, because of…
unaddressed ableist removals from the /c/196 moderators, defense of chasers, no-quarter rules regarding our users, leakage of good-faith DMs from our admin team, and a general lack of initiative to punish these behavior
In her a response to these events, Ada points out in a comment that she never had the chance to adress the ableist incident (she was in bed) while other issues had happened in the past and had been adressed at the time. Thus she could not react before Hexbear defederated.
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2135406
TL;dr: Blahaj.Zone’s users complain about ill behavior of users on Hexbear. Net. A discussion about defederation begins on Blahaj.Zone. Meanwhile Hexbear users complain about Blahaj.Zone in turn and Hexbear. Net defederates instantly and without warning.
I’ve had two major issues with these guys. While not necessarily worth defederating everyone, I really don’t want to deal with hexbear because:
- ALL of their content is political. When they first showed up on my feed, I watched what posts/communities came up and how their users interacted on non hexbear posts. I’ve done my best to remove all politics from my social media. These guys only talked about politics and would go to other communities to turn a normal conversation political.
- Everything was extreme and obnoxious. I don’t understand why everyone keeps calling them polite. There was a constant “you’re with us or you’re against us”/“my beliefs are always right” behavior that was really annoying, especially in a public space that wasn’t polarized before they got there. It reminded me of this one girl from middle school who would walk into a room and loudly talk about whatever she wanted until all the other conversations petered out.
They’re more than welcome to behave like that in their home, but they can’t go to a public space and expect everyone to cater to their beliefs.
Hexbear is what happens when kids (I hope they’re all in their early 20s or teens, because otherwise this gets much sadder) spend years reading on leftist theory but have zero real world experience. They get intense, volatile, argumentative and have no idea how those points reflect on themselves and in reality. This is why they go around prancing those absurd beliefs and fencing anyone who disagrees out, while also dogpilling and swarming communities that don’t agree: They only know what its like to be leftists in theory.
The one person who made the “”“”““peace””“”“” thread had an earlier post here in Blahaj saying that since working under capitalism is coercion then everyone who solicits sex workers is a rapist, and that’s basically the level of being disconnected from reality that they operate in. Unfortunately for them, their echo chamber is going to go on and be the equivalent of a left wing /pol/. For us - and hopefully all other major instances - its a relief to be rid of such crowd.
It really feels like the people who grew up on 4chan and later came out as queer, but never learned how toxic that was
Not a part of blahaj, but the impression I’ve gotten from what I’ve seen (primarily in the lemm.ee megathread) is that for better or worse hexbear takes the concept of radical transparency and debate to its fullest extreme. For the better, it can produce some intensely thought provoking discussions–I’ve had to reevaluate and reconsider my own personal ethics more in the past week or so than I have in the past few years.
But the downside is that it’s Just. So. Exhausting. I fully agree that everything they discuss has a political undertone to it in some way. It feels like they just cannot turn off, and I always have to be on my guard when they get involved in any discussion, even if it’s nominally about a completely non-political topic. Even when they’re making high effort posts instead of spamming emojis and pig poop balls, every discussion feels like a minefield, where the slightest misstep gets you punished with a “here’s a response that implies/outright states you’re woefully misinformed at best and a protofascist nazi at worst, here’s a link to an obscure book written by a communist scholar 50 years ago that you should read before even trying to discuss this topic.” Hexbear getting involved in a discussion is the discourse equivalent of a group playing 4-player FFA Smash Bros. with items on and someone rolls up and demands 1v1, no items, tournament ruleset only.
I feel like I just cannot relax when hexbear is active in a discussion, and it’s not even like I really disagree with their points–yes, the US is too powerful, yes, capitalism is bad–but I strongly disagree with their conclusions (supporting China and Russia because it weakens the US is the equivalent of voting for Trump because Biden/Hillary isn’t liberal enough.) It’s just that they are so laser-focused on debate and so ready to believe the worst in everyone (they called using “top kek” a holocaust denier dogwhistle FFS, that shit originated from freaking world of warcraft, and was popularized on 4chan back when it was just a shithole instead of a racist shithole! I occasionally use it because I’m an elder millennial and I like making dated references!) that even if you support their overall goals and philosophy, you still walk away mentally exhausted because of how carefully you had to parse your words to avoid stepping on a landmine.
I just don’t understand the defense of Soviet Union and China. Just because western civilization committed atrocities doesn’t make “communist” ones any better. “We’re” suppose to be better than that. Actual communism wouldn’t need to commit atrocities
Very well put, mirrors my feelings quite a bit.
Tbh I thought the admins of Lemmy.World were being overzealous when they preemptively defederated from HexBear before we even had a chance to see what federating with them would be like, but from where it stands now I think they made the right call. It doesn’t seem like anything of value was lost.
Despite apparent assurances from the HB admin team that their users are to be on their best behavior outside of their echo chamber, it seems they just can’t help themselves.
Fuckin tankies, man…
Fuck 'em.
Fuck tankies.
Haha… They can deal out the punishment but they can’t take it themselves… Thought so. Never in my life have I been called a slavery apologist, but 10 mins in hexbear was all I needed.
Yeah, they’ve created their own little echo chamber of propaganda + bots and lost touch with the real world.
reminder:
left-unity means authoritarian entryism
tolerance must function as a social contract, or not at all.
reject auth apologists.
Authoritarian is a made up concept in order to make communism and fascism the same thing.
the neck cares not the color of the boot
This is the craziest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.
That’s such a hot fucking take
hot garbage
All political systems exist on some type of multi-dimensional spectrum. Left-right is just one axis, and kind of a made up one where they mean different things sometimes. The authoritarian axis is a real one, and fascism sits on the same end of that axis as so-called “communism”. This doesn’t make them equivalent, but it does mean that they both have some characteristics which are the same and bad. I’m fact, one could argue that their position on the authoritarian axis is all that you need to argue they are bad because authoritarianism is in itself the cause of so much human suffering.
What no theory does to a mfer
ok il note to add fuck tankies to the sign on of a social home instance
