On sh.itsfulla.chuds, and the plan going forward

- Mmmm interesting Canadian instances are dropping like flies.
  If only someone could have warned us.
  
  His son fucking sucks.
  
  I want to re-iterate that during lemmy.ca's discussion of defederation towards hexbear two of the most influential voices were that of an active US soldier (who slandered hexbear) and that of a cop/narc/jailer for the Canadian state. Something that was completely ignored outside of hexbear.
  There weren't many active voices (comments) to begin with in that discussions and yet those two got plenty of points.
  
  I'm sadly not surprised. The level of political, economic, and historical education up here is abysmal.
- We love our beautiful mods dont we folks
  
  Many people are saying it!
- im a little sad there are legitimately some good posters on programmg.dev (no it does not make up for the chuds), hope they find their way onto hexbear/LG or some other good instance like lemmy.ml
  
  Yea programming.dev hasn't been that bad since I assume any reactionaries learned to shut up
- Maybe I missed it but what did .Dev do? They seemed like run of the mill techbro^tm

They can gorge themselves on my shit
- Ty!
- 😠

I'm going to out myself as someone who thought that the funny dunks would be funny and cool, but hearing the concerns of other users here about abusive behavior I'm doing a self crit and saying that I was wrong.
- Self crit is actually ruzzian disinformation and a whataboutism. Sorry, I don't make the rules(-based international order).
  
  whataboutism
  
  ok sorry i didn't know
- I was ambivalent about it "How bad can one more instance of chuds be?" but it's definitely upped the anxiety I used to get from :reddit-logo: of constantly arguing with people.
  
  The main difference is that this was probably the most reactionary instance we had federated thus far.
  
  This is an important point. Thanks for commenting that comrade.
- NGL, the mod log has been rough lately.
  
  federating the modlogs and its consequences
- It's the fundamental tension between being a safe space and an offensive space.
- I was honestly the same
  god those people were like twitter chuds
- Me too. I have been maybe too conciliatory and forgiving of the stuff these reddit-brained users from other instances can do and say.

When I first joined Lemmy, I started on their server. I warned them about becoming the Nazi bar, and left. My hope was that we could bring over any remaining cool people and leave all the chuds behind, but it seems that it has already become nothing but a wasteland of chuds. What a shame.
- Me too - pretty quickly got the nazi bar vibe and moved to a different server.
- Weirdly enough, this is how I felt in the very early days of Voat. We all remember it now as the nazi-infested shithole it fast became. But very early on in its first big wave of ex-redditors, it gained a sizable group of leftists and the kinds of people I like to think of as "left-curious liberals".
  When it became clear that the admins/mods cared more about growing userbase size than clamping down on fascists, transphobes, body-shamers, and other assholes, we in that left and left-adjacent userbase went away because we knew there was no future there.
  
  Reaffirming the nazi bar theory for the 10000th time.

They won't forget us, and all the talk they'll probably be doing for months about us will be free advertising for the curious and marginalized.
To any refugees from that place who are here in good faith, welcome aboard
- the talk they'll probably be doing for months about us will be free advertising for the curious and marginalized.
  As it was then, so it is now

Finally, now that we have federated, we can perform the most important work of communism: cutting ties with other organizations
- It won't be true leftism until we defederate from lemmygrad over some petty squabble. I wonder what their stance on outdoor cats is..
  
  In seriousness, the only cross site struggle session I could see blowing up enough for that is the position on sex work (very very unlikely tho tbh)
- i would suggest an airlock instance or militant wing of hexbear that is able to post aggressively on all the other instances but that basically reduces down to having a lemmy.ml alt account
  
  Would we call it HexPolarBear or go full hog and go with HexShortFacedBear?
  
  A cozy barrier against the rest of the network, like a ~~fantastic~~ ~~amazing~~ ~~wonderful~~ great firewall. Inbound fash get to face the 'wall.
  
  Some Umkhonto we Sizwe style of posters?
- yes, we should definitely should work with libs and DemSocs who totally havent shown their asses time and time again throughout history.
  
  Showing asses is strictly forbidden around here

This was inevitable once the mods over there made it clear that they weren’t going to do their jobs. Good riddance.
- The moment I saw one of their admins complain about anti-white racism I knew it was never going to work.
- They deleted my reply that said something like "We'll keep posting until you respect your Trans comrades" lmao.

this is Hexbears Soviet-Afghan War
sorry, been listening to Blowback se4
- Nah we were pretty quick to realize our mistake so I think we'll be fine. We're just built different. Sorry USSR
  
  Brezhnev, his eyebrows furrowed. Gorbachev, his pizza cold. Bin Laden, when the Mi-8 and Mi-24 helicopters fell.
  
  just gotta keep the admins from getting too old
- you are me five days ago. welcome to afghanistan

I supported federation, and now I support defederating. I don't think it was a mistake to try, and dunking was fun. But a lot of them, including mods need reeducation or the wall.

Arguing with them reminded me of arguing with people in Facebook comment sections tbh

- I find the Hexbear use of weird images scary and disturbing.
  
  Hit that Defederate button 🈲 !
  
  Huh! Hoo! Huh! Hoo! Huh! Hoo!
- hex couture

It's a racist Nazi shithole filled with propaganda-brained liberals
Shits pretty funny to dunk on but yeah I don't blame you for defedding

- Shouldn't feel sorry about voting yes.
  Any immune system needs something to fight against to make sure its working every so often.

- Genuinely, thank you for your service comrade. We've some incredible posters amogus

~~beehaworg~~
~~lemmyworld~~
~~lemmyca~~
~~lemmyblahajzone~~
~~shitjustworks~~
~~programming.dev~~
~~lemdit.com~~
More to the list.
- the victims of communism list keeps getting longer
  
  ain't long enough
- ~~programming.dev~~
  ~~lemdit.com~~
  
  Didn't a German and furry instance also defed from us? I really want a master list lol
- Oh no, not slurpnik!
- Grim reaper knocking on doors meme
- Truly, we are seeing the formation of the Neon Genesis Iron Curtain!
  'Tis a terrible shame that we can't just, like, make a second account on a defederated instance, and then use an app such as Liftoff for Lemmy to combine that account's feed with our Hexbear account's feed... Lo, verily all this defederation is condemning us to a lonely fate, isolated in the fediverse. Alas!
  
  Yeah, I don't understand why people are acting like it's impossible to have or manage two accounts. If you want to fight the posting wars, you can just do that, it's not some impossible task to achieve simply because we're not actively federated with and polluting our own communities with lib shit.
  Like, what's the thought process there, is it a desire to conscript the entire site to be some sort of online revolutionary guard, policing the fediverse and somehow magically infiltrating and taking over other instances?
- Why was beehaw on the list?
  Context: I'm not very online
  
  I think they 'preemptively defederated' us? Unless that was .world, idk the lore runs too deep

- Strong tagline potential

- I was a lib when CTH was around but I was a conservative as a kid. I think I was already starting to make sense at the end of the Bernie 2020 campaign though, like oh this is a bourgeoise democracy kind of stuff. The US loves to lie.
- The arguments aren't about making the shitty posters less bad. It's about showing everyone else reading that the shitty people aren't right, and not letting them drive the conversation. This isn't anywhere near the praxis level of irl organization, and I'm not trying to pretend it is, but it still is a valuable thing to do. The minds of neutral people can be changed.
  Like, the old subreddit did it for me, I can do it for others.
  
  the only thing I can say for it is that I fuuuucking hate ceding space to the fash. deplatforming them would be best but we need to coordinate and apply pressure to admins to accomplish that - posting at them feels good but it's unclear how much it accomplishes, beyond making sure there's some opposition to their bullshit in the eyes of the libs they're trying to pipeline.
- i'm extremely skeptical of "pipelining" in the sense that pro federation arguments are using it. i was a communist who did stuff irl before i found the subreddit and im still one now. i was never a 4chan or reddit poster type and i know i'm not the only one. I thought it was cool to stumble on the subreddit and I don't think there's much stopping any lemmy person from finding us now.
  pretty much same here
- The old sub actually did "pipeline" me towards Marxism-Leninism, but i was already radicalized and clearly to the left of your average Bernie Bro before that, especially on issues like anti-imperialism. I absolutely think that the world needs more of our brand of leftism, something that's both uncompromising, intersectional, and deliberately funny and uncivil - something that combines staunch leftist values with a bite that both hand-wringing radlibs and the classic communist theory nerds are sorely missing.
  The thing is, we need the right crowd to recruit from, and we need to not overexert ourselves while onboarding new members. We need to educate them first before we bring in the next wave.
  And at this point, we're so notorious that the only instances willing to federate with us are not full of potentially radicalizable radlibs that just need to be pointed to the inconsistencies in their worldview, but free speech absolutists that have as many fashy users as you'd expect from such a place. Which is way too many.

I didn't realize how bad that instance was when I voted to federate...
Thank you to our wonderful mods and admins who worked so hard to remove reactionary nonsense from the users of that instance!

Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Not just are shitjustworks users some of the most willfully ignorant people I've yet encountered, the instance mods (from what I've seen) are just massive shitheads in general.
Fuck them, fuck their site.
As always, uphold TC69 thought and death to America.

Disappointing. We picked up real support among some there.
All we are doing is isolating ourselves from ideological participation, and thus leaving the npc libs that are otherwise amenable to hearing our side at the mercy of fascists without opposition.
My position is that time should be allowed to play out to ban the fascists and clear house, this is a process that takes time when federating because initially there are a lot of them and they don't all make themselves known at the same time. As time goes on however and more and more get added to the banlist the issue would die down, leaving out the fascists while leaving the npc libs still capable of hearing what the left has to say.
- My position is that you cannot federate with an instance full of fascists if you're operating a safe space for trans people. The shit that we had to endure during last few days made me seriously consider to leave the site, and i'm still unsure if this is the right place for me when people think we should grow our userbase with recovering nazis. If this repeats itself, i'm definitely gone.
  
  And mine is the same as it has always been, I participated here with the expectation we were aiming to build a pipeline to create socialists, just as we had done in many spaces on reddit. While simultaneously at the same time taking advantage of the slow downfall of reddit and setting up a future of non-corporate spaces off-reddit.
  I've said many times before, I'm not here to create a socialist play house. I want to create socialists. And if this place is just creating an insular distraction for socialists to hide themselves away from capitalism on the internet then it is not something I will support. I get why some people want that, but I don't see it as good for socialism. I have the same negative attitude towards most communes, where people just end up building them for escapism from capitalism, not for influencing society and building real socialism. I don't want a digital commune for escapism. I'm not really sure where I'm at with it right now, but I do feel quite negative and like I'm edging close to leaving, I keep asking what the point of being here is, how it's productive for socialism, and I can't answer that anymore. I'd end up going to any spaces that are simply connected to as much as possible where I can do influence, but if many of us do that also we just become considerably weakened without the large collective of people that is considerably weakened in strength.
  
  I have faith in the mods here. They will always have your back. We have a great little community here
- The main problem is that shitjustworks was too reactionary. It's probably the most reactionary instance we had federated thus far. Like, their entire name is "lolol we call ourselves SJW lololol." It's one thing to have an anti-communist userbase with "apolitical" management that we can push back and draw people on our side and to our site (this is basically lemmee), but once you have anti-communist mods running around hiding their power level while subtly trying to get people on board with the fascist pipeline where even the lemmee Ledditor noticed something fishy, it's time to write off the instance as a loss and pull the plug. Just look at how Goat acts and how they're pretty good at having plausible deniability even when the mask slips sometimes. They aren't just some clueless sinophobic Ledditor, but is 100% a fascist hiding their power level. They're an opp and should be treated as such.
  For me, I'm still of the mind that people should defederate from us rather than we defederate from them, but I'm not going to miss them at all. None of the rank and file added value to Hexbear at all and unlike blahaj, they don't have any real people from marginalized communities to onboard. They're just a bunch of Canadian Ledditors who think an instance called SJW is top kek, so they can all get fucked.
  
  ngl seeing goat's meanwhileongrad efforts really made the whole thing laughable for me. Yes they're an unrepentant fascist but they have no audience even amongst their own users
  
  I thought the name was a reference to an old Microsoft slogan/design philosophy
- I don't disagree with the idea, but having seen some of the vile DM's our users have been receiving, protecting this space for marginalized comrades was the right call.
  
  I and others received those DMs from Lemm.ee users too. Real nasty stuff, but it died off. In part I think because @sunaurus@lemm.ee was happy to permaban people for sending such PMs. As long as the SJW admins were doing that I would expect it to die down after some time cleaning house. The benefit here is that our presence in federation would also get the people behaving this way permabanned and act as a suppressing effect for that kind of behaviour - positively improving SJW. Assuming they actually take the action on it like Sun did/does.
  If however they weren't taking those actions then the whole post and reason for defederation would be different in my mind, because it wouldn't just be about bad users it would be about bad administration protecting that behaviour and by extension fostering it (the same issue as blahaj).
- they've been targeting trans women to DM nasty stuff to. dunking and re-educating is all well and good but targeted harassment is a step too far.
- But a lot of people aren't fully conscious. They are coasting through life without understanding ideology. They are political non-participants.
  The communists, the neoliberals, the fascists? They are participants.
  It's a group that is worth talking about and having a word for. Whether you want to make up a new word for them or not I don't care but I won't pretend it's not useful to be able to discuss them.
- I think some federation leftover is good, but I also think that we ought to look at how we can deal with the contradiction of safe space for marginalized users who brought their perspectives up on one hand and the want to be a visible public force for anarcho and communist talking points.
  When we find a process for that we ought to see how hexbear wants to move forward (i.e. try again).
  I wouldn't mind a breathing or ocean like ebb and tide mechanism. Withdraw a bit (except from some instances), deal with technical and social means to stop the negatives, find a bit of unity and expand again.
  Though it seems to be good to be permanently federating with some instances, as there is habituation that hexbear is there, most of the problems seem to be in the first few days/weeks when our culture is accepted or a local interaction with it is created.
  
  the best idea I've heard is setting up a containment instance -- lib.rehab or whatever -- and have that instance federated widely while hexbear itself keeps federations more conservative. as long as the two hexbear instances stay federated, we're not splitting the userbase, and it gives people a way to get a reprieve when the sludge gets tiring.
  
  Yea if we are like federating it'll be good to mayb put up like a warning that we just federated with Y and shit might be annoying for a couple weeks before bans and avoidance settle. So there's no confusion about what type of space we actually want to maintain and how we want to integrate w new users. Plus it could help to explain like what federation and etiquette etc is expected during the federation period cuz I have no idea what's going on typically
- I didn't see myself or anybody gaining traction with anybody there. Maybe we could've in time but it would've meant going back to square 1 and relitigating all the conversations we've had with libs on other instances. Plus I felt like there was a good chance of it provoking a backlash towards defederating more broadly.
  Generally I agree with you but in this case I didn't get the impression that any of them were gonna listen.
  
  it would've meant going back to square 1 and relitigating all the conversations we've had with libs on other instances
  We can never stop explaining
  It is frustrating to have to have the same argument 10,000 times. But if we're going to get anywhere we need a whole lot more people on our side, which means talking to people and bringing them around.
- All we are doing is isolating ourselves from ideological participation, and thus leaving the npc libs that are otherwise amenable to hearing our side at the mercy of fascists without opposition.
- I don't know what original plan exists if we're only federated to one space that isn't socialist or socialist adjacent.
- The last expansion added lemmygrad, some hobbyists, and a bunch of liberals. The results were mixed but we could live with that I guess. This one exposed us to something resembling old edgy 4chan/IRC style debaters, it's a different sort of user, I haven't seen that style in a long time. We should at least have a deeper look at the instances we want to federate with in the future.
  Gotta wonder though.. when there's trolling against trans people even from small alternative communities that are supposed to have more refined 'protest users' against reddit or other media, what's the state of the anglosphere internet in general? Also it's funny how it maps that the countries lemmyverse people dislike happen to be the countries the collective west is in a cold war with right now.
- Yeah without federation hexbear probably dies. The past few months prior to federation were dire. So many pointless internal arguments and the amount of users and activity seemed to be dwindling. Getting back onto upstream Lemmy and some form of federation was desperately needed.

These "we must defed hexbear" posts are unreal lmao
Unity? Whenever I want to discuss my libertarian progressive brand of communism you all harass me.

Why them, anyway? Have we already run out of leftish instances to federate with?
- I think so, most likely yes. Hexbear and Lemmygrad are extremely uncommon anomalies on the English speaking part of the internet. I'm not sure if there are any more communities like ours anywhere else at all, never mind on Lemmy.
  "Leftist forums" are a dime a dozen, but in practice they come in one of two categories.
  Anarcho-bidenists who are far more concerned about the red fash tankie menace than they are about the bourgeois boot currently on their neck. Those places will immediately defederate from us for shit like not buying into their holocaust denying double genocide theory. Essentially like Blahaj was about to do.
  Vile leftypol/stupidpol type shit holes, which we will not federate with in the first place due to the wild amount of transphobia, racism, ableism inherent to that type of online culture.
  What Hexbear and Lemmygrad has is unique, which is why I am very hesitant to say we should pull the plug on federation as a whole when pipe-lining people here has the potential to spread Hexbear/Lemmygrad thought to leftists forums everywhere if we can grow large enough.
  Conversely, I fear if we close off federation entirely the isolation will slowly kill the site by user attrition as the years go by.
  
  Conversely, I fear if we close off federation entirely the isolation will slowly kill the site by user attrition as the years go by.
  yea that's definitely an issue unless we are actively telling leftist/anti capitalist subs on
  about HexBear so they might join. Ive been a part of some cool online forums and they died off like the Shakers.
- Yeah, the idea is to federate with generalist instances and connect with the cool users present on those instances and counter the western propaganda from the not cool users on those instances. This one turned out to be wayyy too fash to actually stomach though.
- probably lmao, lemmy ain't that huge it's a small world of reddit rejects (spoken as a reddit reject that has been banned on reddit sitewide probably 15 times)
- folks wanted to talk on their games comm
  you know because !games@hexbear.net isn't one of our most active comms

suggestion: make a commemorative emoji for every instance that defederates from us, or us them.
- Hang em in the den
- Gotta add more to the
  wall / chest of medals.

your honor, in my defense, my vote to federate was being cast ironically

good riddance to those racist chuds

Yeah I thought giving them a chance in good faith, but they really are full of
.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/4285049?scrollToComments=true

from orbit. It's the only way.
- The best is when they claim China is pro LGBT and has marriage equality and all sorts of insane shit. China disappears people who talk openly about LGBT rights. If they’re too visible they silence them at minimum.
  It's cool when you're a lemmy.world poster bashing China, because you can just make up whatever while ignoring posts with actual sources.
  
  These libs are so smug.
  Western nations weren't any better (and we're now getting worse because we're seeing a rise in fascists) for LGBT+ rights, but they intentionally ignore that point.
  
  China's restrictions on speech suck but the idea that people are just being black-bagged and shot left and right is ridiculous.
- Piss babies in that thread are crying about
  
  LMAO, our big bacon boi strikes again.
- That is one hell of an image.
  I read this in a respectful tone.
- I love that smug self-congratulatory thing where they pretend "the tankies" are all just edgy teenagers who just haven't grown up and seen the real world yet. That's a fun thought-terminator, I recommend trying it yourself sometimes.
  Even I'm probably older than the majority of those reddit refugees, and I guarantee many people on this site are older than me.
- fucking christ yea, nuke that shit 20 times over.

- fucking wild. I know things spike every time we federate with another instance, but that one was bad news

Posting to change this cursed shit
- that is the funniest coincidence. my chud coworker would see something like this as proof we’re living in a simulation
  
  The cheapest blender they had at Walmart was $14.88 and my internet-addled brain couldn't help but try to imagine a guy in an SS uniform making a smoothie.

they sure were mad about us not being racist or transphobic. really hit home for them.

Yesssss! We have reached out to the human scum, hopefully anyone from the sludge pit who sees hexbear as worth it will migrate here. Now, let's not let the bigotry come here.

It's an admirable thing and from the convos I witnessed, this site and its wiser members may have won a few people over.

- one of their main criticisms is that hexbears are obnoxious. imo it's hypocritical but not totally wrong.
  on twitter or /r/cth, you could assume a politically mixed audience, but when we go into an instance and insult someone for expressing a view their entire community holds, even if that view looks like uninformed dogshit to us, i think it can seem haughty and grating. it's better to point out how unreasonable people are being and then push back on their claims, and then go for the dunk only after we've done the footwork, when we have showed that they are unreasonable and cannot respond to our arguments

Thank you admins, fuck these guys.

They had the gall to act innocent when we constantly called them out for their insanity
all of em gotta go
- Thank you for your service o7

"Should we defederate Hexbear?"
"On sh.itsfulla.chuds, and the plan going forward"
- They always have some sham discussion thread where virtually everybody wants defederation. Liberals are incapable of viewing anything outside of electoralism lol

I want to defederate just to get away from these godawful names "Sh.itsfulla.chuds" wtf kind of name is that? Did a admins cat sit on a keyboard
- lmao that's an even worse name! Goddamn fuck these losers
  
  I prefer to call it sh.itjust.stinks

- The only instance I think that wasn’t like this was blahaj, but just the top individual there to my recalling
  Blahaj's admin always claimed to be amenable to our demands, and she did publicly speak out against the chaser problem and other chauvinist attitudes on c/196 (the problematic, V*ushite comm that made up roughly three qurters of Blahaj's userbase after they left reddit during the blackout), but there was too little decisive action against key problematic figures. It's a good example of how prioritizing growth over ethics can ruin an instance.
- I agree. We need to stop with unidirectional federation.
- Perhaps we could form a sort of vanguard party?
- Sometimes it can be hard to judge. Like the lemm.ee admin is a lib and banned the hamsic, but then our mods talked to him and he ended up being pretty cooperative. The blahaj admin was cooperative and willing to prioritize trans solidarity over political differences, but we ended up clashing because they wanted us to change too much while being too soft on the 196 mod's ablism. I think our admins have communicated in the past but sometimes you just have to actually do it to see what problems come up (or don't).

Yeah, even though I was all in on federating it's not worth our trans comrades being harassed; had no idea how consistently shite that site would be.

Good riddence to the rascists, reactionaries, logic pedants, and debate perverts

Hell yeah. I voted against it to start with and I'm happy to see them go.
- I simply didn't vote, for I am The One True Leftist, and that would be entryism.

My main metric for "did we win" is "how many of us are going into their threads vs how many of them are willing to come into ours."
Owing to the small scale of the conflict, i hereby declare september 4th to be lowercase-v-day.
- i don't think anyone wins when we're just getting pissed off and arguing with people who refuse to consider what we're saying. i could just do that on reddit
- when we have 10 nazis in a thread about trans issues on c/news, i really do not give a fuck if there's 100 of our posters dunking on them on their instance, that just means i no longer want to visit this site. If you value dunking on chuds that much, just make an account on some fash instance instead of bringing them here. What's so hard to get about that?
  
  it's made me dread checking my notification bell. I've started giving it some time in the hopes that some mod cleans out the triggering stuff before I see it. but that's also super unfair to the mods.