All the best to you and the team, I understand it can be rough. But similarly, I think most of what you wrote could just as well have been written by a Lemmy maintainer:

I think a lot of folks don’t realize how hard it is... All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves... The whole team here has dumped 1000’s of hours into keeping this thing alive. It’s just rough to see the comments here.

Lemmy devs are in exactly the same position, and reading the comments in this thread, I am getting the vibe that lemmy.world admins are not willing to see this. Just check the messaging your admins are putting out there (even in the comments under this post), imagine reading that messaging as a Lemmy dev, and tell me it wouldn't feel just as rough.

Btw, I think a clear source of all the negative comments here is not the fact that Sublinks is being developed. Every time Sublinks gets advertised on Lemmy, there is this toxic "finally we can get rid of the original Lemmy dev team" messaging along with it - sometimes it is more hidden between the lines, other times, it's very blatant. This messaging inevitably creates uncertainty in users about the future of their instances. THAT'S the real issue here, at least from my point of view.

I completely agree with you, especially regarding the "Baltics are Nazis" thing - I think it's completely messed up. At least in Estonia, there are three very distinct kinds of people that regularly get called Nazis by foreigners (mostly by Russian media):

1. Actual Nazi sympathisers - they surely exist (as they probably do in all countries globally), but in my experience, this is an extreme fringe minority of people, because the general sentiment is that Nazis occupied and did absolutely horrible things in Estonia in WW2.
2. Conservative nationalists - a much bigger group, but still a minority, these are people who are hardcore against anything progressive, they generally even oppose the EU (often calling it a new version of the USSR, as an insult).
3. People who condemn the Soviet Union - this is the vast majority of the population.

Basically all Estonians belong to the third group (as discussed elsewhere in this thread), so it's actually scary when Russian media lumps these people in with literal Nazi sympathisers. I don't think Estonia can do anything to effectively combat this propaganda either - Russian media is fucking powerful.

I think this thread highlights the general sentiment among the Estonian population perfectly.

Yeah, good point. I've also heard claims that Estonia was on par with Finland in terms of GDP per capita before Soviet times, so many people blame socialism for the current weakness compared to Finland.

Is there any generic "intro to Hexbear" post somewhere that I can point other people to when explaining what Hexbear is?

I think there are a lot of people on Lemmy who would fundamentally agree with most of the values held by Hexbear users, but they never give it a chance because of some bad first impression (either they are told by others that Hexbear users are all just trolls, or maybe they even get called a fascist or something like that by somebody with @hexbear in their name).

Would be great if there was some better intro. Does such a thing exist already? I tried searching but did not find anything.

Heck yeah! I lived in a city with a bunch of architecture like that, always hear people saying how ugly it is, but I love it so much. Nice to meet another fan.

Unfortunately, they’re also fedded with exploding heads, but I’ve never actually seen a post from there.

Exploding heads has been shut down, because nobody on Lemmy wanted to accept their bullshit (they made a long post about it before they finally closed), so actually nobody is federated with them anymore

If you search for Russia on hexbear, you find comments like this quite quickly, like:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3738463

Peace looks like guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality by taking NATO membership off the table and likely ceding the DPR and LPR to the Russian federation at this point.

https://hexbear.net/comment/3765816

We also get a lot of shock at the fact that some of us think, in that situation, Ukraine would have to give independence and security guarantees to the Donbas & Crimea. Many of us think that given the realities of the civil war there over the last 8 years or so, plus this conflict, it’s probably the only way to prevent retributory ethnic cleansing in the region. It has nothing to do with ideas of fairness or sovereignty or any other nebulous concept; it’s about what’s least worst for the working class there.

I've seen many other such comments in the past week lurking here, so it definitely comes up every now and then. I can also see the logic behind these comments, even if I don't agree with the logic myself.

I am personally against American invasions and am not trying to say the USA is somehow good or benevolent, I was just pointing out why outsiders may perceive some hexbear users as pro-Putin

I've seen several comments on hexbear (I can find links if you haven't seen them) along the lines of "I'm not pro-Putin... BUT we should give him what he wants in order to end the war quicker", and as an outsider, I think for sure these comments are actually seen as totally pro-Putin by non-hexbear users, due to how trying to appease dictators has ended for Europe in the past.