It's because we're loud, incredibly active, argumentative, and most importantly we are generally speaking unified. Yes there are differences, but compare the pushback when a hexbear posts something pro-china vs when someone else posts something anti-china. We'll get maybe 2-3 responses, all of which will immediately get dogpiled anyway. They'll get 10 of us. We also all upvote the takes we all agree on, so much so that it looks like vote manipulation. No other group on the fediverse has that type of unity, even if they broadly agree with each other.
Just before federation, when people were claiming that hexbears were a bunch of unrestrained feral super-posters and that we were going to change the fediverse, I thought that a lot of it was just people hyping themselves up. Only now do I realize that we are in fact the strongest posters on the fediverse because of our solidarity with each other. indeed
Hexbear and Lemmygrad formed to be leftist first and individual interests second. So your take is spot-on. I also think that they get mad that Hexbear doesn't have the option to downvote. So they don't get the satisfaction of the power trip and makes them even more pissed off. lol
The funny thing about people thinking we are assholes is that between here, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml I have found this instance to be the most chill. I find myself more concerned about getting attacked on lemmy.ml for even trying to say something that is not in-line with the western media narrative. I am a bit worried about getting jumped on for misunderstanding or having a bad take on lemmygrad. However I have begun to be better at thinking about how I say/ask things when replying to posts. Which I think is overall a good thing and have better accepted that even if I may disagree with folks, that it is better to learn more about those things over all.
For all the shit that I am learning and seeing that gets said about here and lemmygrad. Those folks on lemmy.ml and the other instances are just beyond quick to just outright refuse to take a moment to consider that they are not questioning shit at all. Just super binary "good or evil." Even if they agree that their "side" has historically both lied and done super fucked up shit. It is still unwavering "still much better than insert whatever shit they think anti-capitalism has done to so many people." They completely misunderstand that us "tankies" are just dumb motherfuckers brainwashed into thinking that AES nations never did anything wrong. It also doesn't help that even "progressive" liberals are so firmly conserned about being super slightly left of dead centre. To go around talking shit about how the hammer and sickle should be treated the same as the Nazi swastika. Still believing that the US is the reason we won the war. Nor do they realize how the Cold War was completely kicked off by the western allies renegging on promises made to the USSR for helping recoup. That the massive build-up of nukes was due to our own war hawks lying about the supposed rapid build-up of anything from the Soviets. Cuba and USSR are always the "war mongers" for putting nukes on Cuba, but the US's shit in Europe/Turkiey.
The giant emotes (which generates a lot of animosity when combined with the dubiously low PPB-trigger-threshold of some of our posters when on other instances) are solvable issue. If the devs were so inclined, they could just run imagemagick over them automatically to make downsized copies.
I'm not necessarily saying they should, I'm just saying they could.