I have been watching my love tie herself in knots over the last several days, having to deal with the drama that has been brought on, trying her best to bring everyone back together.

There’s been bad behaviour from both sides, and I’m really disappointed to see that some of the worst of it came from our users, who didn’t keep to the moral high ground, disregarded our instance rules and stoopped to levels of behaviour worse than that leveled against them.

There have been accusations against us (or Ada specifically) that we are a safe harbour for bad behaviour and cause harm to trans people through our inaction.

This is perhaps the cruelest accusation they could have leveled at Ada, as she works tirelessly to maintain a safe space for our community, and while I was hoping, for all the effort that she was investing into this issue, that she could make it work despite my own reservations, this last attack on her impeccable morality has made me very angry.

I’m sorry for those that wanted to remain federated, sorry that it came to this, but I am glad it’s over now, purely for the mental health of my precious beloved.

I really really really dislike how fast so many people here are to discount their members and clamor for defederation. Queer solidarity, Trans solidarity, and Left solidarity is important. The people from hexbear aren’t an “other” we’re all in the same boat, it just happens that people from hexbear tend to be more jaded with the systems that a lot of us are slaves to in the west and in first world countries. Every single one of us is one little disillusionment away from holding the same or similar views as any person from hexbear, (I was already moving in that direction and have already made my own account there, though I started my lemmy usage here on Blahaj.)

Can they be a little overwhelming? Sure. But again, their users trend towards individuals fed up with the systems in place and are past the point of engaging in ways that look “respectable” or in their words, “liberal.”

Edit: It’s also kinda insane how they’re being treated by certain mods even when they argue in good faith. image

When I moved from Reddit to Lemmy, I made an account on blahaj.zone because I wanted to be on an instance that’s run by progressive trans people. Being able to trust that the admins will run an instance that’s actually protective of its members is such a relief, especially coming from Reddit.

Experiencing Lemmy for the first time was an adjustment. I was using “all” when I normally don’t, and that brought a lot of new things, good and bad, into my feed. There were some posts and comments that I found gross, but the things were dealt with or not so bad.

I started noticing a lot of NSFW posts from lemmynsfw with women that looked very young, and I found myself thinking about whether or not to report the content and how the moderators were verifying content. As young looking as possible while being legal and without getting banned was obviously the purpose. I was relieved when defederation happened. All of a sudden my feed was still diverse content, just minus jailbait-simulator. I missed the A+ posts by some of the guys, an Adonis or three, but I survived.

Things were great, then I started noticing the “fuck Ukraine, NATO is evil” posts along with “Tianamen square deaths are CIA propaganda”. That’s when hexbear federated. Lemmy.ml brought different perspectives, and they were valuable regardless of me agreeing or not. Hexbear is different.

Touting LGBT rights in Cuba, that’s great, and I didn’t know about the the changes in 2022. TIL. That’s my entire list of positive hexbear posts I’ve seen so far. I’m sure there’s more, but the community doesn’t seem to prioritize showing that. “Dunking” and snark are not valuable contributions, and the simping for Putin is straight up evil.

Ada and other admins/mods, thank you so much for your thoughtful consideration, your work, and everything you give to make this community run. I’m just a lurker, but I appreciate you all so much.

hexbear users are trying to stir so much shit, we’re better off without them

after I saw the first 2 posts about hexbear i actively searched for posts and comments from hexbear users to get an idea how big of a problem it really was and I found very little. I think defederation should always be the last resort. as long as there is no coordinated brigading and the admins can bereasonedd with to sanction the worst behaving users I simply see no need for it.

I honestly think the hate toward hexbear is mostly manufactured. A lot of the people complaining are the same ones erroneously comparing them to places like exploding heads, claiming they’re nazi trolls, that they go on downvoting raids (they can’t even downvote btw), accusing them of terrible things, but then don’t (or won’t) provide any proof of them acting this way. And when people like me who aren’t on hexbear question it, we get accused of being a “hexbear in disguise” and ignored. It all feels very dramatic and reddit, and I thought the point of lemmy was to not be like reddit. Defederating from problematic instances I get, but defederating because you hate tankies or because of a few bad members seems more of an ‘echo chamber’ choice than a ‘keep the community safe’ choice to me.

I really don’t understand the hate towards Hexbear – sure, some users may be problematically argumentative, but that seems to be true of many instances. Meanwhile, as a trans person, Hexbear was actually one of the first places I felt safe when I started looking for a reddit alternative, and, to me, that means a lot. I’m glad I eventually found Blahaj Zone (both the lemmy and hajkey instances), but Hexbear really does feel like a good, queer-friendly, solidly leftist space, which we need more of on the internet, imo.

Like, we may disagree with their politics at points, but I’ve seen conservative and neoliberal users from other instances being awful to Hexbear users far more often than the other way around. I also think it speaks heavily in favor of Hexbear that some of the anti-Hexbear comments on the previous meta thread were from transphobic users from other instances.

It was inevitable after their atrocious behavior. It sounds horrible to be caught in such a crossfire as an instance admin. Especially because they used their queerness as a weapon to paint us as the bad ones for splitting the community. A painful reminder that not all queer people are necessarily good people.

Thank you for dealing with this situation and making this instance a safer place.

Hexbear is a bare-knuckle community that encourages group think and hair trigger mockery (“LIB!” and variations). In general, they bring that mentality wherever they go. It reminds me of the Goons from SomethingAwful in that way: you could spot a group of Goons regardless of the game, site, whatever.

Those communities can be fun (a supporters section at a football match, for example), but you have to go in ready to take a stray punch or two.

I have an account on another instance for when I want to be out in the world and suffer the slings and arrows and look at shitposts on !chapotraphouse. Sometimes I’m in the mood.

But I think part of the intended vibe of blahaj.zone is that it’s somewhere that as highly marginalized people we can come and not expect to have slurs thrown around, 0-100 name calling criticism, etc.

The culture of hexbear is the opposite of that; it’s not about not subscribing to !chapotraphouse, it’s about how the instance approaches the whole idea of online interaction.

I’d like to thank you (@Ada) for keeping everyone in the loop and dealing with the (sole) legitimate issue that a hexbear user raised as promptly as was possible for you, given that everyone has to sleep and have a life.

Defedding is an unfortunate step, but in this case it felt inevitable. Yes they were very good on issues surrounding representation for all kinds of ‘minority’ groups and there seemed to be a few good apples amongst them but the majority of that instance see absolutely everything through the lens of totalitarianism so its possibly not a surprise that that totalitarianism ethos spilled over into their interactions in the wider fediverse. Totalitarianism forbids dissenting or different opinions, no matter how innocent or minor the opinion and that seemed to me to be the essence of hexbear. The fact that their shade of totalitarianism included respecting trans/queer/non-white/differently abled people is both a good thing and still not enough to justify the rest of their rigidity. I intrinsicly mistrust anyone who is so absolutely certain about every part of their mindset that they cannot brook any kind of differing view, no matter how minor the difference being expressed is. Online, that results in dog-piling, brigading and flooding other instances and all that happens then is users on the recipient instance get bored with dealing with it and stay away.

If we stay federated, I will being leaving Blåhaj. I suspect that atleast a handful of users feel the same. Just being pro-LGBT doesn’t give you a pass to be a terrible person to other people. Like denying literal genocides. It feels like a “I have a black friend so I can’t be racist” argument. Its just as convincing. I’ll deal with the bullshit for a week because that concession was already made. But I’m not dealing with it longer.

I’m super disappointed in the reaction of a lot of blahaj users to hexbear. Sure they were out of line in the initial post in Blahaj Lemmy Meta but they have breathed new life into to fediverse left (if you don’t like the left, what the heck are you doing on a queer instance). They are also significantly queer in numbers and have done a lot of work in terms of their rules and Lemmy customization (like forcing pronouns on all display names) to make their instance as LGBT friendly as possible. The rest of the fediverse could stand to learn a thing or two from that.

They have the potential to be our good friends as we all face the same oppression and share in the same struggles. How about we take a step towards queer unity and left unity in the Lemmy fediverse and not be so trigger-happy with the defederation.

Lots of good points in this thread, but I’d like to offer that even if everyone on hexbear were terrible annoying people, I’m an adult who can block content for myself.

Defederating is good for when an instance is hosting illegal content and you need to keep it off our servers, or if an instance is spamming stuff with bots and abusing the fediverse, but when it comes to content I do or don’t want to see, I want to make that decision myself.

I think not much value would be lost by defederating.

They are denying genocides, they are supporting regimes which are not compatible with LGBT+, they don’t discuss in good faith, there is a lot of whataboutism. They want to dunk people and be right and not have their view challenged.

Unfortunately they have so radical ideas about it all (mostly US centric whataboutism as far as I can tell). They fall into fascist/authoritarian traps where they can’t even recognize they are fighting against people like me or us. They dehumanize people.

I don’t think their views are compatible with LGBT+ spaces and values even though they claim to be one while cheering for the people who would remove them from existence the first chance they would get.

Some people are moderate over there and that were the only pleasant interactions I had with them. I can’t tell if the radicals are a loud minority or the majority. They poison the well though.

Even after all that said I don’t know if defederation is the right choice. I mean they provide some good content and in the end they are a big community. On the other hand I have already blocked the instance using the Connect app and my experience improved a lot.

I think in summary they create a hostile space for all people. Even left leaning people are not safe due to their radicalized views and it is exhausting to have every thread derailed with some unrelated rant by them.

I hope we can have camaraderie between them. This issue is very polarising here, so I’m really interested to see what the vote is gonna be.