Can we defederate from hexbear.net?

I am formally asking hexbear users to stop participating in meta posts on other instances.

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

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.

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.

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Hexbear is widely old Chapo. They're an odd bunch, but honestly I'd defed Lemmy.world long before Hexbear was in sigh.

It's certainly the most trans friendly place I've encountered bar none, the original CTH helped me realize I was trans

you'll never find another instance as trans friendly as hexbear.

if you need to cut allies off to avoid getting trolled idk man, that seems lame.

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.

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.

Hexbear has the highest proportion of people with neopronouns in their names that I've seen on the entire fediverse, and for that reason alone I would prefer that they stay federated.

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?

almost as bad as the_donald though

Don't compare us to the_donald just because we're not libs. I'm trans, just also a Marxist Leninist.

Hexbear is more trans friendly than the majority of trans places, honestly. The reason for this is the mods defer to trans users on what counts as transphobia, half the mod team itself is trans, and offensive posts are removed quickly before they can affect other people. I'd say its more trans positive than here, based off what I've seen. There are chaser comments that are left up even in response to moderators and admins on blahaj, these would be rapidly removed on hexbear. Plenty of trans places, this one included, also are not very good at weeding out people that are being sneaky about their transphobia and chaser habits, which can poison the well. And not only do the moderators of hexbear do good work, the dev team specifically goes out of their way to program ways to make trans users feel more comfortable (e.g. the universal pronoun tag system).

As a trans woman that is also a survivor of abuse, jokes are made all over the internet about sexual violence and its very hard for me to avoid upsetting my PTSD. Hexbear actively removes these sorts of posts rapidly, too, and even removes borderline cases like bringing up SV out of context and without content warnings. For these reasons hexbear is the main site I visit, no other site or community really comes close.

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.

When you blocked it, why should you do more? Everyone who wants to block it can do so, you don't have to force your preferences on others

Lemme know how it goes. I've been asking for this for ages, but my admins won't listen

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.

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've been filtering hexbear's communities from my all feed with uBO^1 because of the tankie vibes, but outside their own communities hexbear people seem to behave themselves reasonably well. considering lemmygrad is defederated i can expect them being defederated as well just because of the politics, but they don't seem too brigade-y to the communities here.

to be fair i've been blocking all the politics and politic-adjacent communities left right and center so perhaps i'm just not seeing the bad parts of hexbear, but shitposting wise they seem alright.

the only real gripe i have with hexbear is that lemmy's handling of emoji in general suck and man do they like their emojis. but that's a software issue more than anything

It's exactly the same vibe as the donald and the users are just as bad as the Donald users were.

I'd second this. I've gone through and blocked most of their communities manually but they definitely threw off the vibes. They're not a fun bunch to be around.

You can filter out instances with Ublock Origin for desktop and Sync for mobile. This will remove any posts and comments from users from that instance. It's a lot easier than trying to get your instance admin to defederate a major instance or setting up your own while still getting rid of hexbear for you

seems like its home to a lot of irony poisioned predominantly white leftists but i think comparing it to t_d is a stretch.

i wonder if theres any leftist instances that are worth spending time on, theres not very many of them and it seems like the ones that are out there either have started to die out or have been widely defederated from due to toxicity.

i wish there were larger spaces focused around real world political action, organization and solidarity because there would be so much value in having that on a platform like this.

Idk, but if you're a person of color, don't go to tankie instances because they're seriously racist over there

Yeah fuck those guys

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I've been blocking individual communities as they pop up in my feeds.

I wish there were an easier method for this (like via the vertical "..." kebab menu) without having to click into the community directly.

Let's chill on the defederation unless it's really bad for a while.

My opinion is please defederate. Thank you.

Other instances (including mine) have defederated from them. Apparently a tonne of people from Exploding Heads just commandeered the instance one day. Hexbear admins are also inactive.

I'm hoping it won't have to come to defederation. If the users are too disruptive that's understandable. Perhaps they'll chill out in other instances following this backlash and federation will be viable.

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Update (cross-post from the other thread):