I figured since their admin has asked them to stop participating over here it may be worthwhile to get a new discussion going that is primarily blahaj. I’m almost certain they’ll still be upvoting so keep that in mind as that may skew things. Worthwhile to check in from instances that have already defederated them. The previous thread definitely left a bad taste in my mouth but what do y’all think?
Old thread can be found here
EDIT: With regards to the post on new federation guidelines here: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
The current top comment is:
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
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After speaking to one of their admins and seeing the change in the rules on hexbear, I’m happy enough with the outcome.
Trans solidarity is incredibly important. It’s the reason this instance exists. I prioritise that.
Hexbear (and Beehaw) is one of the only Lemmy instances that genuinely prioritise the protection of their gender diverse users, and honestly, if for nothing else, I believe it’s worth a bit of discomfort to find a way of staying connected.
Trans solidarity isn’t beneficial when they’re also brigading, harassing and abusing people, and disrupting threads constantly. They might be allies in terms of LGBTQ, but they are actively harmful in every other way.
Im very saddened to hear this. Sounds like staying in an abusive relationship because “They have good times too”. I hope you rethink this decision, or myself and atleast a few others will stop using this instance
All I can say though is the reason I am making the choice not to defederate now is because I believe that this is the best chance of developing a large positive trans userbase on the lemmyverse. At the moment, unlike the broader fediverse, lemmy and kbin are quite hostile or indifferent to trans folk. Despite hexbears bullshit, one thing they are, is strongly supportive of trans rights. And if the bullshit is kept to their own instance, then we can benefit from the voices of their trans users.
If they can’t keep their bullshit under control, then we’ll cut them off.
Why not give it a chance and see how it goes?
The users of hexbear just are very bitter that we didn’t adore their aggressive comments on the last post. I really just have a hard time seeing anything good coming of remaining federated.
They just call everyone who doesn’t like their behavior a whiny liberal.
Keep in mind they have been in an echo chamber for three years. It’s not a surprise that there may be an adjustment period where they work on their culture and come out better.
When I think of all the times that I’ve marveled at the person I’ve become (through working on myself), I’m really impressed that I got where I am. People change and grow and adapt and evolve. So do communities.
I like that Blahaj wants to try to find solidarity. I hope for this to be the attitude on as many instances as possible.
Why should we have to suffer for their inability to socialize positively outside of their bubble?
Another positive is that their feistiness will be directed at any transphobic bullshit in the wider fediverse
And what’s your opinion on this admins take from their post on their recent rule change?
It’s one of the highest upvoted comments on the thread.
Or the highest upvoted comment in that thread that’s pretty blatant on how they feel about coming over to the rest of Lemmy?
Which one is the admin in that post?
That would be Carcosa
Here’s the same image but with the admins name uncensored.
I would not even call Hexbear extremists or allies, they are just plain trolls who use leftist arguments and tone policing to establish themselves as superior. The current thread on the supposed ableism that is being argued is a clear example of that: Tone policing, forcing absolute rules on who can and who can’t use their dialects, moral judgement on strangers based on absurd rules, and not to mention the flooding and baiting that has been done so far. They are the equivalent of a SomethingAwful leftism, loud, demanding and pointless.
Voting for defederation, if only to clean up the mess that they’ve been making.
If you want my honest opinion, tolerating tankies is not worth whatever kind of project you want to build. I think we should unite forces with trans people on trans issues sure, but giving a platform to tankies ain’t it. They’ll poison discussions, as they already have, name-call and take-over whatever thread they do not like. They like to put on a nice face to avoid being deferated, but I doubt it’ll last.
I feel like every time I see a comment from hexbear, it’s a tankie with the most insane take possible. I often see them use their emotes/memes not to add to a conversation, but to deflect or avoid directly responding to criticism. I also keep seeing entire comment threads taken over by hexbear as soon as one of them replies to someone. Almost like a bat signal goes out to call in reinforcements. I’m sure that’s mostly a product of them being terminally online and not necessarily malicious, but I have to block like ten hexbear users for every one I come across that isn’t like that.
It’s worth noting that most of the hexbear users I see are under politics stuff posted on large instances like .world and .ml, so these issues may be less prevalent or even non-existent on posts hosted on blahaj.zone. But fuck I really hate the energy they bring on. Honest to god I almost stopped using lemmy altogether because of how bad it gets under most of the posts I come across. I’m sure a lot of hexbear users are fine, but I don’t like constantly blocking half of a comment section because the tankies came out of the woodworks to say some dumb shit about Ukraine or whatever. I doubt I’m the only one constantly blocking tankies from hexbear.
I’m mostly posting this to see if others feel the same way or have had similar experiences. I’ve searched for posts about hexbear a couple times over the past week and haven’t seen one until here right now. I’m going through the first post from two days ago and it seems like I might just be coming across a very loud minority from their instance. If that’s the case, then defederating seems extreme and unnecessary. But if this is just what most of hexbear is like, I’d prefer to defederate and let the non-tankies make a new account here or on another instance that we federate with.
Update after two days: I’m officially casting my vote as “defederate from hexbear please god,” final answer. The tankies and trolls are exhausting and I’m sick and tired of dealing with them. Either they can’t be reigned in or they simply aren’t. It’s not even just their politics. Now that I’ve been thinking consciously “is this comment’s bad politics indicative of the whole instance” I’ve noticed that a lot of people from hexbear are kind of just assholes. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. “The good ones” can make another account here or somewhere that we federate with. But honest to god, most of their instance is a drain on my mental health and I can see that I’m not the only one from blahaj zone that feels that way.
I know they come off as trans-friendly, but they also let tankies run defense for authoritarian countries that don’t treat queer people like me well. If hexbear keeps up like this I’m just gonna stop using lemmy altogether. Logging on isn’t worth the excruciation of dealing with their instance. I know Ada wants solidarity with other trans-friendly instances, but I don’t think the tankies and trolls at hexbear care about that, and I don’t think the rest of their instance cares enough to get them to chill out. It feels like they’re taking advantage of blahaj zone’s charitability to keep vomiting authoritarian apologetics and brigading any comments or posts that call out that behavior. Dealing with that isn’t what I signed up for.
In the interest of transparency, this comment was at 38 upvotes when I added this update.
Almost like a bat signal goes out to call in reinforcements. I’m sure that’s mostly a product of them being terminally online and not necessarily malicious
In the case of the last defed thread, it was because someone posted a link to one of my posts in their “dunk on libs with shit takes” community.
That’s the issue I raised with their admin. The admin deleted the post in question and made changes to stop it happening again.
Going forward, it’s going to come down to this. If they dogpile on any blahaj lemmy community, or any external queer or trans communities frequented by our users and impact the ability of blahaj members to use those spaces, we’ll be talking defederation again. I’m hopeful that it won’t come to that though
I’d be suspicious of drawing those kinds of subtle lines in the sand. Malicious groups savor those kinds of guidelines so they can dance around them and test their firmness.
The spirit of their dialogue is designed to be disarming, giving them a foothold in this community. Their chosen behaviors and methods of influence are not what I want to see in a virtuous fediverse.
Maybe this is because I have a guarded heart after being burned a lot, but if you’re giving someone “one more chance”, that’s a good sign you’ve given them too many chances already.
That explains why I saw a bunch of them commenting on a few random posts over the last few days. Randomly a comment had a reply from a hexbear account and then over a dozen replies in a comment chain of mostly just hexbear users.
I thought it was just luck that they all saw each other to meme together, but them having a community for posting comment links makes sense.
almost stopped using lemmy altogether
I definitely empathize with this
I’m not from this instance, but I know exactly what you’re talking about and had the exact same experience. I had to block over 20 accounts per thread when they’d flood in to spread their nonsense and harass people, and it almost made me quit the site entirely. They’re like a horde. When my instance defederated with them, it was a night and day difference for how much better the site is to use. Comment sections are actually usable and you can discuss China/Russia/Ukraine without them flooding in and disrupting everything. As someone from a defederated instance, I believe it is a good idea for you guys to do the same.
It’s not a bat signal, likely the thread popped up into their “all” feed and a bunch see it at once.
Some of the stuff is because they were already a very established community with their own culture, who has only just recently federated with others. They are bringing their culture, which is full of memes and shitposting, out to where a good portion of normal Lemmy users don’t even know how to post a picture, and it is a lot all at once. It does seem that their admins want to have relatively good citizens, and it seems like most of what Blahaj really cares about is compatible (they are possibly even more extreme with caring about it). Being disruptive in political threads does not seem like a good reason to defederate an instance.
In this case, it was very much a “bat signal”. They posted about it and linked straight to my post in their “dunk on a lib” community
Ada in another post:
That’s the issue I raised with their admin. The admin deleted the post in question and made changes to stop it happening again.
Yep, they did. Which is why I’m pushing to remain federated. They took action and addressed the issue. But there very much was an issue before they did
I think they need to be defederated. Many users over there seem to be very edgy and tankie. I also saw too many very upvoted posts from this instance with bad faith arguments, idiotic takes and strawmen, with lots of users supporting this crap
Where in the blahaj rules does it state that you must be squishy and also be a supporter of the deadliest, most antisocial and most destructive economic system humanity has ever seen
Are you trying to argue in bad faith on purpose? StarMage’s post mentioned nothing about being pro-capitalist or anti-communist.
Well they seem clearly anticommunist
Tankies are authoritarians. You know what they meant.
Tankies are whatever the user or the word wants it to mean. Plenty of liberals use it to mean anyone left of Bernie (although I’ve even seen it used about Bernie for his comments on Cuba and because he visited the USSR). So no I don’t.
I also find the word authoritarian to be unhelpful and nonspecific in many of the instances it’s used when referring to communists
Tankie has a definition and we’ve been using the term in line with that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie#:~:text=Tankie is a pejorative label,Leninism%2C whether contemporary or historical.
I’ve said almost all I care to on this matter except to point out that it has taken less than a day for a Ukrainian war related post to appear on 196 and for hexbear “Marxist Leninists” to start proudly proclaiming their pro Russia opinions. You give these people a platform by staying federated and they will do this, and whether or not you consider their opinions to be offensive is somewhat subjective (I do) they are at the very least a major vibe killer. Anyways, I was right and if this shit keeps popping up in my feed I’m out, peace.
Yeah I’m a strong supporter of Ukraine in that conflict not just for political reasons.
I know 3 people who’s lives have been massively impacted by it; a friend who went home to defend his home who has been unreachable for a year, a friend who lost his whole family less than a month into the conflict, and a friend who now has his parents and younger brothers living with him because they fled Russia when it all kicked off.
To say I have strong opinions about the conflict is a bit of an understatement.
I’m so sorry about your friends. At this point the admin has made it clear they have no problem with this behaviour. Literally making excuses for and handwaving a cryptofascist state ravaging one of its smaller neighbours doesn’t constitute harassment.
It doesn’t seem possible to me that you can maintain a safe and inclusive space for all queer people while allowing a minority to engage in war apologism and all other manner of Soviet themed, larper bullshit. I really don’t want to actually try to address why what they’re doing is inexcusable because frankly they live for that kind of engagement, but its fucking shameful that this has become an issue at all, let alone a permanent feature of the community.
I really hope that your friends stay safe.
Hexbear literally has a community for organizing dogpiling and brigading (even Ada mentioned it) and Ada’s only problem was when it was used on them and their community†.
That’s not behavior that should be condoned by our community.
By not condemning it it makes us look like we support that idea, which could easily lead us to being defederated by choosing to associate with Hexbear still.
I don’t want to see our friendly instance get defederated because our admin won’t defederate from an openly abusive instance.
Edit: † By community here I mean specifically the meta post, and if it’s used in other spaces frequented by queer folk against queer folk.
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Not to mention they’re basically saying, “You should enjoy our abuse and be thankful for it.”
Yeah that’s straight up abuser language.
And given that they have a community dedicated to organizing dogpiling, I’d say that the admins are complacent in their abuse of others and that’s not a community I’d want to be associated with or for us to be seen as associating with.
Edit: I accidentally a word
Why would anybody thank them for doing nothing but spam propaganda and huge emojis and brigading? Absolutely delusional. The instance I’m from defederated from them and it’s been a night and day difference. You guys should do the same.
First comment for me, but I’ve been a blahaj member since the migration. When I learned about hexbear, I was really excited because I lurked r/cth back in the day and always liked their content a lot. I’m a GenX queer anarcho-syndicalist who is terminally irony poisoned and moderately online, so it’s basically my people.
So I spent a bit of time looking at what they’ve built over the last 3 years and it was impressive. The reasons behind the mandatory pronouns are fantastic. As a cis person (sorry), whenever I specify my pronouns, it’s an attempt to normalize specifying them so that it isn’t just for trans people. That’s why they added them in hexbear, and when they did that, it outed a whole bunch of transphobes and shitty people, who were then removed from the instance. Sounds like good praxis to me. Seeing cynical interpretations of that sucks.
They also don’t allow downvoting, same as us, for many of the same reasons.
What we’re seeing right now is a culture shock because they’ve only been loose in the fediverse for a week, and the folx over at hexbear are having a struggle session about it. They’ve been in a bubble for a while and they seem to know it They didn’t know their emojis were so big, they’re working out guidelines for engagement, they’re trying to rein in the users who are getting too aggressive (including admins and mods DMing people).
It would be really cool if we at least gave them a couple more weeks to get the hang of things. Their communities are easy to block and the instance as a whole is very value aligned with blahaj. Queer and leftist unity is important.
Being harassed and called a lib for criticizing their dogpiling doesn’t feel like unity to me.
Not minimizing that at all, a lot of that wasn’t cool, but it was a handful of users from a very large instance, so it wasn’t necessarily the fault of the whole instance. They’re having internal arguments about that last thread, and many of them feel gross about it (notice they aren’t here this time). They’re also gonna have some new users who are too eager to dunk on libs to think about it for 5 seconds - a human problem, not an instance one.
Editing to add this link https://hexbear.net/post/353633 Wherein hexbear tells us all their universal safe word, and links to their code of conduct.
Safewords are agreed by participants ahead of time, happening to know their magic word isn’t the same thing.
There’s a big difference between not bowing to respectability politics and respecting the culture of other instances.
I’d be willing to see if they improve but they’ve got a fair bit to make up for after that last thread.
That is a fair point, though, as a Catalan anarchist, as much as I believe in the unity of the left, I cannot and will not collaborate or tolerate tankies, history knows we tried that in times of need and it did not work out.
I’m with you and feel the same way. I think that many of them came in really hot and somewhat misdirected. I think with the chance the good will outweigh the bad.
I’m also a former /r/cth poster though too, and while I’m not a ML, I’m also not repulsed by the general flavor presented by the average poster there. That’s said my impression is that the average hexbear user was more of the moretankiechapo type than the Bernie supporter type. Not a problem for me but I can see why there would be culture shock.
Either way I’m glad this is the direction Blahaj is taking if only so I can doomscroll more leftist shitposts without changing instances.
My opinion is please defederate, thank you
I shared what I learned about Hexbear in the previous thread. As far as interacting with Hexbear goes, if we keep our interactions to sharing memes and support for trans people then I think we will be fine. I like the idea of getting along with them, but they have to meet us in the middle. If they continue to be disingenuous about their political views then I think we will have problems.
What do you mean by disingenuous? I feel like they’ve been very upfront with their political views, to the point of causing problems with how upfront they are.
I told them upfront that we moderate tankies. I told them I thought the best way for us to get along would be for them to be honest. I said I don’t mind communists, but I do have a problem with authoritarian communists. They insisted they were just communists. One of them seemed to imply I was being presumptuous by putting “authoritarian” in quotes.
Then after about three days of talking, they started giving me authoritarian communist talking points. You can check my comment history. But it’s all in the I Love Twitter Rule post. When I gave them my opinion that they were defending authoritarian government’s like North Korea and the Taliban the two people in question suddenly stopped talking.
Then I posted what I found in the previous meta thread. The same person who had defended the Taliban came on and tried to safe face. I suddenly got a bunch of other replies on the I Love Twitter Rule thread too. One person started defending North Korea and China, and reciting Russian propaganda all in one comment.
The problem I had with it, is those people could have just admitted that they agreed with these authoritarian communist talking points from the get go. Rather than doing that, they tried to gaslight me. If a group of people don’t want to outright admit what they believe when prompted, then that’s an indicator that there is something wrong with those views and that those people know it.
Do you really think they identify as authoritarians? I’m guessing from their perspective, it is often a matter of a lesser of two evils question or trying to separate and acknowledge the good in some governments in addition to decrying the bad. Many of them are proponents of critical support of existing socialist movements—meaning support plus criticism. It is a practice of empathy and materialism rather than idealistic good vs. evil thinking.
Side note, how is anyone supposed to know what people mean by Russian/Chinese propaganda when US liberals label anything that isn’t on the official US Democratic Party approved list of acceptable thought as Russian/Chinese propaganda?
It’s not about what they identify as. It’s about if they agree with authoritarian views.
Tankies aren’t arguing one side is less bad than the other. They claim authoritarian regimes have done no wrong. That oppression is preferable to freedom.
Side note, how is anyone supposed to know what people mean by Russian/Chinese propaganda when US liberals label anything that isn’t on the official US Democratic Party approved list of acceptable thought as Russian/Chinese propaganda?
Please explain what you mean by this. I do not want to guess. What is the official US Democratic Party approved list of acceptable thoughts?
It’s not about what they identify as. It’s about if they agree with authoritarian views.
If you ask a communist whether they are authoritarian and they don’t identify as such, they are going to say no whether or not you would later determine them to be authoritarian. I was trying to explain the difference in worldviews causing that disconnect
Please explain what you mean by this. I do not want to guess. What is the official US Democratic Party approved list of acceptable thoughts?
There is a loud subset of hyper-liberal-types on lemmy and especially reddit that will see any criticism of US foreign policy, the CIA, the OAS, NATO, and many clearly biased and Western capital-aligned NGOs, or any acknowledgement of positive aspects/accomplishments of post-revolution China or the former Soviet Union and declare that the person making that criticism is a Russian/Chinese bot. It’s as if some people think that the US and its allies can do no wrong, and China and other socialist states or movements can do no right
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I’ve been doing the same since I got to Lemmy with Lemmygrad, and now with Hexbear
The last thread was incredibly toxic thanks to hexbear users. If that is what they do on discussions about them then they are in effect nothing more than trolls. We should Defederate.
I hadn’t noticed an issue with hexbear until the recent post. They definitely gave me a bad impression of their whole instance with their behavior.
I definitely think defederation is in order. Unless I’m mistaken, the most their admins have done to stop the brigading has been a comment on the post saying to stop interacting. No post on hexbear, nothing.
They seem like a bunch of shitty trolls. Acceptance of trans people aside, there’s not really a reason to continue to federate with an instance like that.
EDIT: they just added to their code of conduct disallowing the kind of behavior we saw yesterday. Still unsure if remaining federated is a good idea
Yeah I’d say we can expect more as an admin clarified it’s just for other instances meta posts. In the same post where they updated their rules.
I’d recommend checking the thread and sorting it by top. it’s pretty telling what they support.
Putting this down as it may be relevant. It was posted very recently:
I edited my post to mention this. I think it’s notable that the current top comment over there is:
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
“Enjoy our abuse, it’s good for you.”
Yeah I’d say that’s a shitty take seeing so much support over there
Edit: And this response from one of their admins about dunking on people being the point of federating in the first place is pretty damning.
