chat

The biggest divide between Hexbear and the instances hostile towards Hexbear (not all instances are hostile to Hexbear, despite what many try to claim) is analysis of Imperialism. Hexbear largely agrees with Lenin when he analyzed how Capitalism eventually evolves into a form of international exploitation in the book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Not everyone here is a Marxist, many are Anarchists, Syndicalists, or other forms of Leftist, but this central critique of Imperialism forms the basis of Hexbear's overall foreign policy. There are other divides, of course, such as Hexbear's unapologetic support for trans rights, veganism, opposition of the settler-colonial genocide in Palestine, and more, but the Imperialist critique is the biggest divide.

How do I view Lemmy.world? Fairly negatively. The Admins have admitted open hostility towards Marxism, and censor comments and posts that point to the Democrats being complicit in the genocide of Palestine. In addition, many users have been guilty of bigotry, and open transphobia I report seems to stay up as long as it's directed towards Leftists.

Overall, if you're chill, you'll be fine here. Really, despite the fearmongering on other instances, my time on Hexbear is the most enjoyable. The News thread is informative, the general thread is fun to chill out in, the gaming comm is great for talking about Fallout: New Vegas (my hyperfixation, lol), and more. The people here are the friendliest on the Fediverse if you're a Leftist, and the scariest if you're a bigot.

Hope that about does it!

I'm shocked at how often people there claim that all our Communism and Trans posting is some sort of front and that we are actually secret right-wingers.

I don't think much about them at all unless they're brought up. I do find the fact that they need to lie about us in order to make us look bad very telling though.

I feel like the rest of the fediverse thinks about us a lot more than we think about them. We were here for years before most of the big Reddit-clone instances started up, and had already developed a significant site culture and norms. Many of us were ambivalent about federation in the first place, and .world and others defederating from us as a "preemptive last resort" was pretty much just funny. The hysterical propaganda about how insane and abusive we are is also funny; this is one of the friendliest and most supportive places on the internet as long as you're not a fascist. We're happy over here doing our thing away from all the Redditors.

I just want to thank you for being open minded enough to give us a chance after how they talked shit about us

I’ve had mostly bad experiences with world users. Lots of blue MAGA liberal types, who think any criticism of democrats is a vote for trump (and now look what’s going on with the Gaza ceasefire…). I got banned over sharing the fact that democrat senator joe Lieberman single handedly tanked the public option of obamacare. And they really don’t like it when you support Luigi.

Honestly they’re “centrists” but leave racist and anti semitic (not anti Zionist, straight up anti semitic) content up while removing leftist content.

I’m over at the anarchist instance dbzer0 after my original account hosted on world got banned.

Lemmy World defederated from Hexbear for political reasons. They didn't like explicitly socialist content. They are incapable of accepting its existence. They did this in tandem with banning leftists that were vocal and active on their platform at the time.

This is extremely obvious because at the time this occurred the reasong they claimed for the defederation was because that Hexbear does hate speech. This is blatantly bullshit to anyone that spends even the slightest amount of time here, Hexbear is probably the LEAST tolerant of reactionary behaviour and views of every lemmy that exists.

That however does not agree with the turbo neoliberals who run lemmyworld, who can not tolerate any views to the left of their own.

How do you view .world

Dot world has trended rightwards ever since the defederation of Hexbear and banning of leftists on it. They will continue to trend rightwards. If you remove left wing voices from your space the result is a right wing space that increasingly alienates everyone as it becomes more and more reactionary, with more and more people leaving because they can not tolerate how obnoxious the right is, and leadership increasingly will pander to the right when left with the choice of doing so or dying as a site as those are the only users they will still have.

I personally wanted to remain federated with lemmyworld in order to continue to engage liberals, educate them, and pull those that I could leftwards. The truth is that lemmyworld defederated because they knew I and others would have been successful in doing that. The majority of Hexbear would probably oppose federation now.

They convinced themselves we are all tankies and now are hiding from us. In reality, we just got the better more consistent arguments and they don't have any recourse against them except to ignore us, make up a strawman of us and lie to themselves.

They defederated before I even heard them speak.

Not a hexbear but:

VTC had problems with lemmy.world

Their size and ethos mean that users are very poorly moderated, and basically all users that would come to vtc to stir shit were identified with .world accounts.

The admins are also very hostile to vegans.

I exclusively post on hexbear and have never visited, browsed, or posted on the other lemmy instances because I am exclusively here for the hexbear community.

Whenever I am reminded that .world exists (by someone here posting about them posting some frantic stuff about us), I remember that they "pre-emptively de-federated hexbear as a last resort", which is such a hilarious phrasing to me.

The lemmyverse's general hysteria about hexbear is an ugly little microcosm of how western chauvinism manifests towards foreign others, and in that respect it's extremely pitiful and depressing to watch the same brain-worms at play.

I didn't even know there were other places connected to this I came here because it's an extraordinarily welcoming leftist space that is fun to browse.

I don't think about them at all

I view .world fairly negatively, but I'm a bit conflicted about it.

The overall ethos is the type of milquetoast liberal (as in capitalist) tech bro that I associated with some of the more annoying and smug parts of Reddit. The politics comm has all the familiar trappings of /r/politics and there is a fair amount of "red scare" type posting, especially if China is involved. The smear campaigns against the .ml and hexbear instances also get under my skin.

It's the instance I would first suspect of becoming a "Nazi bar" in the long run because of their prominence and typical faux "tolerance" (though sh.it.just.works might be worse). Some here would probably argue it already is one. Same as what happened to Reddit over time. Subs like KiA, the Donald, and the general conservative sub just wouldn't have been as big in early Reddit, even as Libertarian as it was.

It also is arguably hostile to Lemmy as a platform. If you subscribe to their Fediverse comm, then you'll see a post at least once a month that exists to harshly criticize the Lemmy developers and the platform as a whole while providing space for every reactionary developer to advertise their competing platform. I find that harmful to Lemmy, which is the most successful Reddit clone to be created by far.

However, it's a big instance, and as much as I like my platforms being full of leftists, I don't mind interacting with more uh everyday people. There are a lot of comms that probably would never exist here. Plus they just bring a lot of activity to the platform as a whole and they aren't all bad.

Pretty much why I made my .ml account my default. I can interact with hexbear, .ml, lemmygrad, .world and the others. Sometimes that's for the worst, but it's mostly been a good experience.

But yeah I'd take hexbear every day over .world if I had to choose. Even with the terminally online struggle sessions.

whenever i'm on my lemmy.ml account and i see something horrifyingly hateful and/or condescending, it's a .world user like 90% of the time

it's gotten to a point where i don't even like to go outside of hexbear anymore because it's just upsetting to see all this reddit-tier shittiness on a platform that used to be so pleasant in its early days. wish it had grown organically instead of having that exodus of reddit's dregs honestly, but at least most of them seem to have congregated on one particular (blockable) instance

Asking for evidence of Uyghur human right abuses from 2021 onwards will get you banned from most communities for "genocide denial", saying that "Israel has a right to defend itself" is frowned upon and downvoted but accepted discourse. According to them, Putin is "le evil RuZZian war criminal" [fair enough, he's oppressing women and minorities within Russia], whereas Biden is just a poor old guy who tried his best to stop a genocide in Palestine but the US position in the middle east is nuanced.

Basically they only move within the allowable western (mostly USian) Overton Window, and thus their flavour of "leftism" (most are self-declared leftists or liberals) leads them to parroting most US state department propaganda, especially when it comes to non-western countries because of racism

The other big instances that were only created as a response to the reddit "exodus" are kind of a joke to us, as we existed for 3 years in our own community before they were even conceived - yet somehow we are consistently derided as the "invaders", "brigaders" or generally othered explicitly due to the range of political opinions expressed here and a site culture of having no respect for civility, decorum or norms when discussing political matters.

.worlders will continuously deny that reasons for their group hatred of hexbear are political, but as a number of posters have pointed out and supplied the link to, .world defederated with hexbear as a "pre-emptive last resort". Therefore, no .worlder has ever been able to see our posts or comments whatsoever, unless they were also registered to another instance. Their announcement post outlining the "pre-emptive last resort" also explicitly outlines the reasoning as political.

On the civility aspect, realistically at the core of it this is also political - I think many here agree that the bounds of "civil discussion" are specifically drawn to entrench the status quo, and also note that an easy tactic to silence dissent is to attack the manner in which words are said when you cannot logically attack or disagree with the substance of the argument (I swear i'm not trying to act like a debate pervert, but I do sound like a dweeb here). This inherently grows from a contradiction though: Why is it civil to be able to debate the validity and existence of marginalised peoples, or justify genocide, or argue for the upkeep of the current hegemony? And why is it not civil to tell those who justify genocide, argue that the current hegemony is inherently superior, or believe that people's existence should be erased to eat shit? This is where many other instances (mostly those established in 2023 and not 2020) refuse to apply thought, leading to a dedicated handful posting everywhere possible that hexbear is "aggressive" or "abusive".

All in all, we have our little corner of the internet and we like it. We dabbled in federation, given Dessalines' vision for lemmy as a platform, and had our ups and downs. But overall, given the process of the "pre-emptive last resort" and the related threads at the time, we probably don't think about lemmy.world often, other than when we bring it up as a joke to laugh at. It's a place where redditors ran to continue to be redditors on lemmy software instead of reddit and feel good about themselves for it. It is administered and moderated like the former "default" subreddits are, with all of the white cishet american male hang-ups that this entails. Many therefore think it is a deeply unserious place, and subsequently pay it the amount of mind it deserves.

I'm gonna be honest, I don't browse any of the Lemmy instances defedded from Hexbear, so the only time I hear (and think) about them is when there's some drama sufficiently inane that it's spread over here (.world's recent policy changes, cis Lemmy users throwing a fit over neopronouns on the other trans instance .blahaj.zone).

This has probably given me a bit of a skewed view of, like, the more bigoted and intellectually incurious side to the instances. There are no doubt very nice people over there, but no one ever gossips about how nice another person is, so all I hear about is the creeps.

That said, I do think they have a really strange view of Hexbear over there that's partly the result of the all the arguments that broke out when Hexbear first moved over to the mainline Lemmy fork and began federating, but also partly because how Hexbear's been hyped up as some sort of evil, communist gestalt over there.

Take this comment from one of the threads in your recent post for example:

Hexbear was never federated with .world, from what I've seen browsing through the commenters account they've never made an account on any instance other than .world. This isn't the first time I've seen someone say something like this, whenever this inter-instance drama comes up again, you get comments like this from instances that never federated. It's like people have fixated on an idealised version of us to the point at which they have some sort of collective false memories of a much more aggressive Hexbear than the one that really exists.

they suck and they're cowards

As others have said, they defederated from us pre-emptively on false pretenses, and so it doesn’t make much sense for me to browse there casually as I can’t interact with users there.

Because of that, the only time I see what’s going on there is when people post the bad stuff they say on /c/Slop, which definitely makes the userbase look a lot worse than it probably is. As in, I think that most users there are most likely fine but there is a ton of really nasty ones that I can only describe as evil.

Unfortunately, I also think that the admins are among the nasty ones as I’ve seen a lot of bigoted comments not being deleted or the ones who wrote them being banned, and of course the things they said during the defed were also very disappointing.

i sometimes wish they would go back to reddit or move off to bluesky, discord, threads, loops, etc. and it's clear that the latter is looking more and more likely, i just need to be more patient.

i hate that they've engendered this spiteful opinion from me from all the vitriol, brigading, banning, and the "advice" that they gave you in asklemmy and it would have made me abandon lemmy; like i did reddit; were it not for hexbear and the .ml's.

i think that they take offense when you point out the propoganda that they (hopefully) unwittingly repeat or that their support for genocide enablers goes well beyond an election and it also makes me think that i need to have more patience; but FUCK is it hard to do when they poisoned the well before you're even aware that the other people exist.

I don't really think much of them. I'm just here because hexbear is probably one of the only places on the internet that accepts my ramblings on ballistic missiles, geopolitics and working towards a polycentric/multipolar world. I don't use the rest of the site outside of the news megathread much. I'd probably be banned on an instance like Lemmy world because of being "anti west/anti NATO" or something like that, even though I try to make sure my analysis is unbiased. Lots of people on hexbear probably think I'm a "doomer" of sorts because my analysis is not as optimistic as theirs. But they engage constructively with what I post, which is the difference when compared to other instances which would likely ban me for the reasons I listed earlier.

For your question: I don’t think about them at all.

The rest is just my general feelings on federation and hexbear that you are free to ignore.

I was against federation to begin with. I was even against lemmygrad (still am, much as they are comrades). I browse by local even now.

Hexbear is hexbear. It grew out of r/cth (I voted for the name being chapo.chat and was against it being changed to hexbear). It has its own culture. It’s own social norms. It doesn’t need to be a part of anything bigger. Note: this doesn’t mean it’s users don’t have flaws and that there haven’t been things in its culture that have needed to be changed in the past and in the present.

IMO, there was a time when federation could’ve worked, maybe right after it was created when it was young and still finding its identity. I understand the idea of finding new users especially as the number has dwindled from the peak (which itself was a shadow of cth in the first place).

But attaching itself to lemmy, lib-central, was always a failed endeavour. A better option would’ve been trying to become a leftist hub for Reddit communities in the wake of the cth’s closure and that was tried but it failed due to numerous factors (some were, honestly, this community being too toxic to such things which is what has partially led to the decline in numbers in the first place).

But all that’s the past. We’re a part of Lemmy now for what it’s worth (and not even, as some tried to claim in the beginning, as the big bad posters - I remember that what some here tried to say we would be due to our memberships!). They can all defederate from us and I couldn’t care less. They are all useless libs.

Some positive things to end this on. The reason I was on cth and came to chapo.chat and have stayed on hexbear. This is the most trans positive place I have ever seen (cth wasn’t but I wasn’t trans then either lmao). But now? I dare you to find a safer space on the entire internet.

This is the only space where I can talk to other leftists from around the world to both shitpost and get educated. I learn new things everyday. I also take the memes with a grain of salt. We don’t worship at the altar of Assad. But it feels good to at least be among others who can see the fucking hypocrisy of supposed progressives who care about human rights criticizing Assad and then telling to us to vote for democrats. Go fuck yourself.

Like, this space was created because cth got banned for praising John Brown. Don’t forget that.

This place even now, despite being 99.99% Leninist professes by and maintains ideological neutrality. It is extremely rare to see a leftist space that doesn’t bash either anarchists or MLs (and isn’t instead just social democrats). You wouldn’t know this if you haven’t been here a while I guess, because most people here are MLs but you can be an anarchist here. You can also, btw, criticize china or dprk or Cuba etc. I’ve done so. Just don’t be a lib about it.

So, hexbear to me has become an extremely rare instance of a platform which is not only queer-friendly but also genuinely leftist and accepting of all leftists. It isn’t perfect. I think around a month or so ago (maybe more, maybe less) there was a big issue surrounding misogyny. I think admins/mods worked to resolve that but someone else might know more.

This became much longer than I intended it to be. TLDR: hexbear is a comfortable safe space. I know the people. I know the posts and comments. I know what to expect. Every other social media platform (except TikTok but it too throws the odd curveball) fills me with anger and I have to mentally prepare myself for battle because I know there will be useless libs spouting their regular bullshit. None of that here.

The way they talk you'd think Internet comments cause them physical suffering. They act like disagreement and emoji spam is tantamount to slapping someone in the face. They're so genuinely bizarre about norms and manners.

I don't really get it. Really thin skinned and weasely.

lemmy.world is often filled with fascists, transphobes, and rejects from all the various left wing groups on the fediverse. world recently had a whole debate about allowing flat earth content on their site, which is very funny considering their website logo is a globe. most of the people complaining about hexbear in that thread were people with downright fascistic takes like supporting the genocide of palestine or complaining about pronouns.

we have our own little queer divebar vibe so if you hint at being xenophobic or homophobic you will be shown the door pretty quickly (in fact, our trans space has the highest degree of moderation of any front facing trans space on the internet with 40 moderators, we frequently ban transphobes within a couple of minutes). also fun fact: 2/3rds of users here are queer or questioning, and about half are trans or questioning.

are we superior? strictly, lol

I left .world the day they announced it.

Honestly, I never liked it that much. It's very... reddit-y