If so, was it polled somewhere?
So I was just looking through literature.cafe a bit, and came across this excellent comment chain by Janvier. It outlines the history and culture of Hexbear, and makes a very solid argument for defederating them.
TL;DR- Don’t defederate Hexbear because they’re a bunch of genocide-apologist authoritarians. Defederate them because they’re annoying, and will burn out your moderators.
Personally I think it’s an extremely toxic community that represents the worst of the internet. They’re extremely set in their ways and provide no meaningful content or discussions on the platform. That’s totally fine for them but they can do whatever they want in their own safe space.
I would prefer them to be defederated mostly because I can’t block an entire instance.
I would prefer them to be defederated mostly because I can’t block an entire instance.
This is in development, fingers crossed it could even come in the next version of lemmy.
Report every hexbear comment and let the mods know how you feel. Should send the message.
Could you fucking not? If they annoy you, block them. If they don’t break any rules and you report them anyways, the only thing you’ll achieve is annoying SJW moderators. At that point, you’ll get banned before Hexbear gets defederated.
As a moderator in a different community, please DO report all malicious comments posted wherever they are
Moderators with a brain understands the purpose of the “I wasn’t born yesterday rule”
I wasn’t talking about malicious comments, I was talking about all comments made by users from a specific instance, wether they are malicious or not.
Are you a mod?
I suspect they are coordinating to boost their comments in other communities/instances. Their fringe political views are always highly upvoted, I just find it suspicious. Many places have rules against brigading, so where I suspect it I will report it.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right. But I still think it’s good to communicate to the mods/admins that a lot of users do not like hexbear because they are disruptive in every community they visit.
I commented on here already about our instances interaction with hexbear. It’s a disaster that led to somehow them defedarating from Blahaj for being not safe for their LGBT members even tho Blahaj is like one of the most accepting instance for LGBT people. Many of us were trying to ask our admin to defederate from them because those on our instance felt unsafe. Felt like a “no u” moment they tried to pull before we defederated them for not being safe for our members lol.
Then Blahaj started getting spammed by a new user who was calling a bunch of trans users anti trans. They also said our admins was anti trans even though she was openly trans. Then that user began spamming across lemmy how Blahaj and it’s admin were anti-trans and should not be visited.
Also saw that user get a Blahaj user banned from lemmy.world even though nobody in that discussion was commenting on an lemmy.world community. It has a lot of shit so everything below is just that story.
What happened was another trans Blahaj user commented on a post on some 3rd instance and the OP of that post basically said “I know your reputation from elsewhere and your comment here proves your anti-trans reputation”. The Blahaj user went wtf and then realized the OP was one of those commenting on the original trolls post and was basically saying the Blahaj user was anti trans. The Blahaj user was rightfully pissed and accused the OP of being an alt of that troll since they wrote in the same style as the original troll (I honestly was feeling the same as I read it all). The OP wouldn’t reply and just stuff like " I refuse to reply to you" or “please don’t talk to me” or “I respectfully ask you to not engage with me”. It all felt trollish since that OP was the only who started the argument and now refused to engage after starting.
After the 3rd attempt at an reply , a lemmy.world admin came in saying that if the Blahaj user replied one more time to OP then they would be permanently banned from all of lemmy.world. Keep in mind this wasn’t even on lemmy.world and the whole thing started because OP insulted a trans user by stating they were anti-trans. The Blahaj user was still pissed since she got insulted for saying she has the reputation of somebody who would hate everything she was and replied again. The original troll from way earlier came to the post & replied to her and tagged the lemmy.world admin saying they needed to be banned for being a chaser and replying after being told not to. Then the Blahaj user got banned.
It still feels so fucked that a lemmy.world admin would step into that 3rd instance and threaten the Blahaj user with loss of access to the biggest lemmy instance if she didn’t ignore being called an anti-trans. It really helped show me the short comings of lemmy since every instances admin will probably just take what a user from their instance state as fact and ignore the other person.
Sorry for that long comment. It’s just that I saw how hexbear will twist words in their favor like with claiming Blahaj isn’t safe for their LGBT members and then strangely had new accounts show up calling trans Blahaj users as anti-trans and realized that it was just way too on the nose as where could these users have came from.
Wish they would defederate us again lol
We all laughed in Blahaj when they defederated first lol. It was so childish for them to block us for being unsafe right before we were about to do it lmfao. They tried so hard to change the narrative but it failed.
I feel bad for any instance that has to deal with them in a daily bases. It makes scrolling through lemmy annoying unless you block every fucking community from them.
Maybe we should encourage defederation from our end, that way we’ll be safe from them since if they defederate us they can change their mind whenever they want and go back to spamming us if they are bored.
I believe they did defederate again but yeah we should on our end too
I’m still not seeing them in the blocked section on hexbear.net
But even so it would be a good idea for us to block them as well since leaving them unblocked means they can come back anytime they like.
A bit misleading description of CTH on reddit, because they most certainly developed their obnoxious behaviour and jargon already back then, and they did very little to combat racism and fascism there precisely becuase their obnoxious behaviour was counter-productive to such goals (also there were other subreddits far more active and useful in combating fascism and bigotry on reddit such as r/againstallhatesubreddits, which did actual work on deplatforming fascists).
But other than that it is an apt description of their behaviour here and why they pose such a problem for lemmy in general.
I don’t mind the general hexbear ideology in itself. Sure. You do you.
But, damn, I see more than a few of its members just being obnoxious.
It’d be lovely if you could just see the hexbear powerusers somewhere convenient and mass block. I went through a couple subreddits of theirs, found the top posts, blocked everyone with more than 50 upvotes. Real pain in the ass, but I suddenly have far fewer teenagers who peaked in middle school debate club to deal with.
You call us toxic and then still call things “subreddits.”
What a factual yet utterly meaningless statement.
It’s a joke about how reddit sucks and we’re mostly here to get away from it, sorry I’m not good at jokes but I like to try :)
Real pain in the ass, but I suddenly have far fewer teenagers who peaked in middle school debate club to deal with.
This statement isn’t even internally consistent, are we teenagers or did we peak in middle school?
You peaked in middle school, you’re now a depressed teenager in high school or therabouts.
Try a little harder when trying to pose as a well intentioned and reasonable human.
well intentioned and reasonable human
Stop LARPing as a Silicon Valley logic machine. It’s creepy and cringe.
B R I G A D I N G
Having other troglodytes upvote you doesn’t make you right monkeys, it makes you look transparent.
Civility is when I get to deride anyone who disagrees with me as a child and they are forbidden from saying anything mean in return
As you so excellently demonstrate.
“hexbear is toxic”
Correct!
Do some self-reflection
Try a little harder when trying to pose as a well intentioned and reasonable human.
Imagine typing the paragraph that came before this, and then going on to write and post this without detecting the irony
I make no such posturing, because I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think of me. I’m not dedicating my life’s work to… making other internet less pleasant for everyone else? Because you can’t possibly be so deluded as to think your actions as a whole are positive?
Anyways, there’s no chance in hell lil smoothbrain me is going to convince any of you enlightened geniuses of our time to pull your heads out of your collective asses. I’m just annoyed you make the meme machine worse.
I’m not dedicating my life’s work to… making other internet less pleasant for everyone else?
You are posting from an instance full of people who have been doing nothing but that since we whitelisted you
Pfft, please cry about it and get your whole cult to fuck off. Would be so much simpler since we can’t block entire instances yet.
Anyways, your echo chamber works better the more enclosed it is. Win win!
You can actually go to Hexbear communities like mentalhealth or mutual_aid and half the posts are shit like “I need help paying rent” and “I hate my job”
You’re so married to the reactionary idea of “Communists are all just ignorant teenagers” that you can’t see the evidence against it when it’s right in front of you
No, you’re just the worst kind of communist/socialist: the insufferable type nobody else wants to fucking deal with. Stop giving socialism a bad name.
I won’t call debunking imperialist propaganda from the west, and dunking on racist and ableist users, “obnoxious”.
Anyways,
spoiler
Mate. That’s not the obnoxious part. Posts like this are the obnoxious part.
dude’s trolling. There’s no way tankies use that image, that is one of the most cringe things i’ve ever seen in my life
Have you browsed Hexbear? This ain’t trolling. It’s very much genuine.
If it is trolling, then it’s just an entire instance posting an inside joke and then pointing and laughing at the people not in-the-know who don’t “get it.”
It’s not clever.
Lol what an absolute clusterfuck.
Not liking ablism and racism is an in-joke?
This is why ya’ll can get fucked, I’m tired of seeing this garbage in my feed.
Yeah, mate. That’s the in-joke I’m referring to. [sarcasm tone indicator, cuz some of y’all need it]
A reasonable person can infer that’s not where my issues stem from.
All this tells me is that Hexbear folks get their jollies from trying to provoke people with weird stretches.
“You don’t like some of our users?? Wow, you’re pro-rascism and ablelist!”
It’s not cute.
You present needing tone indicators as a negative. Why is that?
[sarcasm tone indicator, cuz some of y’all need it]
You know what it’s not cute? Discrimination. In this case, your ableism.
We call out the ableism and racism of some users of this instance. That’s the real reason of your “obnoxious” feeling, regarding the Hexbear users. Our zero tolerance to hate.
Scrath a liberal, and a fascist/racist bleeds.
[sarcasm tone indicator, cuz some of y’all need it]
Yeah! Fuck people who need tone indicators, we shouldn’t be inclusive to those people
“America bad looool I just debunked imperialist propoganda”
Is just about the highest IQ take I’ve seen out of hexbear. Ya’ll got that cult-like disconnection from reality.
Also when there was a user in unixporn yesterday asking what words will replace “ricing” now that it’s entered social consciousness that the term has a racially based origin, a hexbear jumped in to say it’s now going to be called “crackering”.
Wow, dunked on that racism so hard.
It was so racist of that user to better themselves and replace a racial work with a non-racial word. Good thing we have hexbear to help out.
Having had a disagreement with you in another thread and seen you mischaracterize it as “supporting the rape of innocent women and children” to someone else, I’m fairly confident that if anyone has a cult-like disconnection from reality, it’s likely you.
If someone tells me it’s bad to be anti-racism, or that systemic racism isn’t real, I’m of course going to say they support racism.
Your position was that it’s bad to help Ukrainians defend their families from being raped because it damages worker solidarity. Yeah, you’re not going around raping anyone yourself, you simply supporting the system in which it occurs.
And I don’t think supporting the system of rape is intentional on your part either. I think you’re anti-America (which is good) to the point that you’ll be apologetic towards rape (which is bad), as long as it means you keep being anti-America.
Your position was that it’s bad to help Ukrainians defend their families from being raped because it damages worker solidarity
No, actually I was articulating someone else’s perspective, which was that advocating for greater conflict as retribution for rape is misguided, and I think it’s a reasonable perspective and not, as you and others were suggesting, evidence of faux leftism.
But good-faith representations of perspectives you disagree with doesn’t seem to be one of your strengths.
No, actually I was articulating someone else’s perspective
Someone else as in a real person?
Or a hypothetical person you made up in your head?
Does knowing who’s perspective it is really change your opinion of it? Or are you asking so you know who you can accuse of being a Russian apologist?
If it stands up to your scrutiny then I wouldn’t think it matters.
They’re abrasive enough that they couldn’t even get along with lemmy.blahaj.zone, a dedicated LGBT friendly instance ran by several trans women, out of accusations of said admins being transphobic
Also can’t forget them getting offended over /c/196 because they have a “no tankies” rule, which apparently is a slur for them
196 is by far the main community on blåhaj, and their banner basically says “no hexbears.”
Also, trans hexbear users gave examples where they were bothered by chasers in 196, and felt not enough mod action was taken to control chasers there. I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.
I’m sympathetic to Ada, blåhaj’s admin, I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat when the community in question is most of her site. But I don’t think hexbear’s reasons for defederating are that absurd.
This accusation always confuses me. Blahaj zone was around for half a year before the reddit migration, long before 196 was on lemmy and we did fine without them. They’re here not because they wield crazy power, but because they’re a queer lead community, with a strong queer user base. That means they have a home with us, because creating spaces for communities like that is the reason Blahaj Lemmy exists in the first place
The truth is, the hexbear admins asked me to talk to the 196 mod team and ask them to remove the “no tankies” rule, because hexbear users wanted to be part of 196. I told them to talk to the mods of the community directly, because I’m not going to force political opinions on a queer, trans fem lead community.
The 196 mods rejected the hexbear request, and like that, the hexbear narrative changed, and suddenly their users no longer wanted to join 196, claiming that it is transphobic and unsafe. So either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request.
Either way, part of their narrative change involved painting 196 as being both harmful and unassailable, with blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community.
From my perspective, the biggest harm to trans people in all of this isn’t a trans fem lead community with politics that run counter to hexbear, but rather, the ongoing demonising and dogpiling of specific trans folk and trans communities by the hexbear community.
I think she really means well and I get that she might not want to rock the boat
This is also an interesting part of the ongoing narrative. It’s not a co-incidence that I’m being painted as naïve; well meaning but ultimately ill equipped to deal with moderating a large community. It allows people to attack me without attacking me.
The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.
You can disagree with my choices, but the narrative that they are naïve and ill informed is simply a tool to trigger an emotional response in people, to develop sympathy for the hexbear claims, to undermine my perceived competence, without them having to outright demonise me.
It’s a cheap tactic, and and a cheap tactic typically used to undermine women in positions of responsibility at that.
The truth is though, I’ve been moderating online spaces and building and developing communities online and offline for nearly 30 years. I’ve managed tiny communities, and communities with hundreds of thousands of users.
It shows. You’ve handled this saga admirably. As someone with none of that experience who has performed significantly worse in navigating this situation, I’m happy to know that there are people to lean on.
Hexbear voted strongly in favor of federating with us and their admins assured us they would be well behaved. They immediately brigaded our main community and disrupted all local discussion for about 48 hours by spamming our communities, and then defederated from us, citing absolutely no evidence of misbehavior by our users in the defederation announcement. They claim ableist slurs, but considering they think the word “crazy” is an ableist slur… it rings somewhat hollow.
It’s not even the politics that bothers me, despite the fact that they often take pointless, inflammatory positions. It honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space.
When they see a user from another server make a good point against their narrative, they swarm like white blood cells fighting an infection, hurling a combination of invective and irrelevancy to prevent the cold hand of logic from penetrating their bubble. The discrepancy between their treatment of their own users and users from any other server (barring lemmygrad) is remarkable to witness.
The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.
I’m still very upset about this whole situation because I know chapos, I listened to the podcast, I frequented the subreddit. Back in 2016/7 I thought wow, the far left is making a bit of a comeback here in America, this could be the start of something.
Then eventually reddit banned the subreddit and it seems that was all it took to dismantle that budding source of leftist activism. I guess I’m partially to blame, because I’m one of the many voices of reason that didn’t bother putting in the effort of joining a different site. Clearly, the extremists were the only ones who cared enough, and the 3 year isolation surely solidified that fact. The only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.
And now they actively sequester themselves from… pretty much everybody, comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives. It’s extremely frustrating to know that thousands of potential comrades have been neutralized, and in fact are potentially being wielded like a bludgeon against real western leftists to blunt our ability to effectively collaborate and find common ground.
There’s really no sage advice that anyone can offer in the wake of what is very apparently a major disappointment to you. They were just more insecure and… emphatic than was required for the job you entrusted to them. Looking back a decade, you’ll find people preaching for social changes that are now ubiquitous despite their champions’ entirely uncharismatic involvement.
The game’s not over, it just needs new players. I fucking despise hexbear now, but my opinion on socialism is largely unchanged, if that improves your mood in the least.
If nothing else, the past week has reinforced my confidence in the local users of sh.itjust.works. Hexbear has been a massive disappointment, but SJW has, as always, provided an abundance of good takes.
I’m not cashing in my chips, I’m just realizing that I need to raise my level going forward. Hexbear is like the level 1 boss that we need to defeat to reach the next stage of Lemmy’s growth. They have a bombastic opening attack, but upon closer analysis they also have gaping vulnerabilities.
If we ever refederate, a whitelist rather than a banlist may do some good. SJW simply lacks the moderator capacity to filter the mix of culture shock and bad faith users. Granted, a whitelist would be a huge undertaking in and of itself, but I can’t see any other way forward between our two instances.
To me this is kind of a life lesson on extremes.
As in, adding opposing extremists into the mix doesn’t really balance things out, you’re just stuck with more extremists of a different cult.
I’m still very upset about this whole situation
Yeah, I feel that. I put a lot in to trying to federate with another instance that is strongly protective of its gender diverse members, and for it to end the way it did was a bit crushing…
comforting themselves by making vague assertions of unspecified minor communist victories in their real lives
many hexbear users organize, volunteer, and work in orgs. Some have unionized their workplaces. As /u/Pax recently pointed out to you, no one on hexbear seriously views posting as praxis.
it honestly feels like they intentionally lose arguments by aligning themselves with horrific human rights abuses and authoritarian regimes, just so they can claim to be misunderstood and preserve their safe space
The actual hexbear position is that certain human rights violations appear to be fabrications to manufacture consent for US foreign policy, and there is significant historical precedent for this. See the Nayirah testimony in 1990 before the Gulf War, the Iraq WMD reports before the Iraq invasion, the fictitious accounts of genocide in Libya before the NATO bombing that obliterated the country, and the large number of North Korean defector testimonies that have fallen apart under scrutiny, as reported by the Guardian. Major operations against foreign nations require the consent of legislators and the public. Atrocity propaganda is how that consent is manufactured.
Hexbears can back up these positions with a large number of credible sources, but threads outside of hexbear rarely get to that point. There’s no reason to write a long, well-sourced post when the audience views hexbears as fanatical, irrational tankies, assumes the sources are bullshit, and does not read the post. Threads get stuck at a simple level of discourse. People trade short jabs. Liberals accuse communists of supporting genocide, and communists, rather than dive in to respond to that accusation and have no one listen, instead accuse liberals of not caring about American imperialism, because this is shorter and punchier and it reaches some people.
That does not mean there are no human rights abuses in socialist states, especially the massive country of China, and it’s still important to have nuanced takes, but hexbear does have nuanced takes, it’s just hard to get to that point in the discussion when you first have to defuse allegations that you are some fucking sociopath who wants to watch the world burn for no clear reason.
I think hexbear flippancy is natural when the prevailing response to a good-faith post is “shut the fuck up you disgusting tankie, I’m not reading that.” “Genocide denier” — or, even less accurate, “genocide supporter” — is an easy accusation to make, and a hard one to respond to when no one even fucking reads your responses because you’re an evil tankie and nothing you say can be valid.
As for authoritarianism: hexbears generally believe, again based on historical precedent, that the alternative is to be coup’d by the US and replaced with a far-right dictatorship or neoliberal puppet government. This is what happened, for example, in Chile in 1973. Elected socialist leader Salvador Allende was overthrown by a far-right, US-backed faction in the military, which then went on to torture and murder thousands of socialists, infamously throwing some of them out of helicopters. Allende could have prevented this by purging fascist officers from the military. This would have saved Chile but condemned Allende to being called a fascist on lemmy.
I wish the Indonesian communists under Aidit had armed themselves, as Mao had advised them to. Maybe they could have prevented US-backed fascists from rounding up and slaughtering more than a million communists in Indonesia, as detailed in The Jakarta Method. As far as I can tell, no one on lemmy has even fucking heard of this let alone cares enough to condemn it.
The 20th century is a graveyard of crushed socialist states and movements. The only survivors were those that hardened themselves against attack, and that means authoritarianism. It means suppression of dissent and propaganda in the press, it means a secret police to ferret out CIA agents and their assets. It means mistakes and false positives. It means innocent people getting swept up in it. The best comparison I can make: it’s like how a lot of the symptoms of an infectious disease are caused by your own immune system fighting it off with limited tools and hurting you in the process. The alternative is to get fucking killed by a pathogen.
Imagine if, after you fought off malaria, malaria then went on TV and maligned you for having an immune system.
On top of that, the authoritarianism has often been overstated! In authoritarian Cuba, recently, Cubans just democratically drafted the country’s newest family code, hammering out the details in over 80,000 citizen councils around the country. That code, among other things, affirms comprehensive rights for LGBTQ people. Even earlier, hormones and gender-affirming surgery have been free in Cuba since 2008. And then western media depicts Cuba as a despotic regime that should be overthrown or sanctioned, while keeping silent about the 73% of dictatorships that America provides military aid to. Maybe democracy is not America’s real concern.
continued:
only question remaining is whether governmental agencies (whether they be American/Chinese/Russian) have played any role in infiltrating the community and nudging it toward its current level of absurdity.
in the previous sentence you pointed out that hexbear has been isolated for 3 years.
Why the fuck would any government give a shit about them?
The most dangerous idea that exists, from their perspective, is that any Western nation has ever done anything beneficial for the world. As soon as they acknowledge any positive aspect of democracy or capitalism, they surrender their moral high ground in being able to call for the genocide of all westerners and white people, and their noble communist crusade collapses into the shape of most other human enterprises, that tattered and wizened visage of emotionally fuelled tribalism.
I’m gonna gloss over the “genocide of westerners and white people” comment and give you the benefit of the doubt.
You mentioned democracy. What democracy? In all seriousness. People have looked, and they don’t find it.
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens (2014) — Cambridge University Press
from the abstract:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
and from further down
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
What was it, 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare?
Where is the democracy? Even mathematically it’s questionable. The districts are gerrymandered, poor communities have woefully inadequate election resources and wait in line for hours to vote, first-past-the-post tosses out millions of ballots, and it’s all filtered through the electoral college. But even before all of that, corporations own the fucking political parties and the media! Corporations own the think tanks that write the fucking policies! Corporations fund the campaigns! Voters are a fucking afterthought!
America is not a democracy. And even if it were, where are its accomplishments? Domestically, living conditions are getting worse every year. People are poorer and more precarious. Infrastructure is failing. Millions of people have addictions they cannot treat. What wealth there is is massively concentrated. Internationally, much of America’s wealth is extracted from the impoverished and underdeveloped global south, contributing to massive, widespread global poverty. 9 million people fucking starve to death every year under global capitalism so that western companies can buy cheap outsourced labor to enrich a small number of owners and shareholders.
Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015 (2022) — Global Environmental Change
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200005X
Unequal exchange theory posits that economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the global North relies on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through price differentials in international trade. Past attempts to estimate the scale and value of this drain have faced a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, and have been unable to capture the upstream resources and labour embodied in traded goods. Here we use environmental input-output data and footprint analysis to quantify the physical scale of net appropriation from the South in terms of embodied resources and labour over the period 1990 to 2015. We then represent the value of appropriated resources in terms of prevailing market prices.
Our results show that in 2015 the North net appropriated from the South 12 billion tons of embodied raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of embodied land, 21 exajoules of embodied energy, and 188 million person-years of embodied labour, worth $10.8 trillion in Northern prices – enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $242 trillion (constant 2010 USD). This drain represents a significant windfall for the global North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. For comparison, we also report drain in global average prices. Using this method, we find that the South’s losses due to unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30. Our analysis confirms that unequal exchange is a significant driver of global inequality, uneven development, and ecological breakdown.And that’s not mentioning the fucking wars.
Post-9/11 wars have contributed to some 4.5 million deaths, report suggests
There are open-air slave markets in Libya now. Great job, America.
blahaj admins being unable to act out of fear of loss of the community
that was me speculating, bridging the gap between my main points of information: 1) that I had seen trans hexbear users discussing chaser messages they had gotten, and complaining that there were too many chasers in 196, 2) that I had seen posts from you where it was obvious to me that you care and consider chasers to be a problem, and 3) that 196 was a lifeboat community and is larger than the rest of blahaj.
If you’re happy with 196 how it is, then the three interpretations I see are 1) that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem, 2) that they have a lower tolerance for chaser behavior, or 3) that they have a lower threshold for what they deem to be chaser behavior — or some combination of the three.
either they don’t believe what they are saying about safety, or they do believe it but were fine with that state of affairs before the 196 mods denied their request
Or it’s not all the same people, or their opinions changed. But I also think emotions were running high. I remember posts where hexbears were pretty upset that users on blahaj had accused them of pretending to be queer. There are also a lot of comments like that here, but I think it hurts a lot more coming from other queer people. Overall, I don’t think the situation brought the best out of anyone.
that hexbear users who complained of chasers were misjudging or exaggerating the extent of the problem
This is exactly what happened.
The two instances that I am aware of.
The first instance was a cis guy responding explicitly to a prompt from a trans person, talking about how their attraction to a non medically transitioned trans man wouldn’t work, precisely because he acknowledged that his attraction would be based on elements that would make the hypothetical trans man in question uncomfortable.
This was not a cis person volunteering an opinion to trans folk unasked for. It was a cis guy responding to an explicit question from a trans person, whilst respecting trans identities and acknowledging the reality of dysphoria.
The resulting discussion about that topic lead to a huge outbreak of transphobic commentary from external users. That lead to me making a post calling out the transphobia and aggressively banning anyone that crossed the line.
This all happened months before hexbear joined, and the post from me addressing the issue is still visible in 196.
It’s not an accident that this incident only became an issue for hexbear folk after the 196 mods refused to remove anti tankie political commentary at hexbear’s request.
The second instance was a hexbear user reporting someone making chasery comments to them. I asked for details so I could ban the person in question. Before telling me who it was, the hexbear user asked me not to ban the account in question, because they looked like they were a newly out trans person that had taken a joke too far (they were calling people m’lady as a joke). In any case, I talked to the poster making the comments, and told them that it’s making people uncomfortable and they need to stop. They did (they already had before I messaged them)
And that’s the “endemic” of chasers. A trans person making an ill conceived joke, and a single cis person answering a direct question from months ago.
I can absolutely understand why some people would be uncomfortable with both of the events in question. But even allowing for that, what we have is two misrepresented events that were actively addressed at the time they occurred, one of which occurred months before hexbear even appeared on the scene.
Again, it’s not an accident that most of the chasers hexbear are concerned about apparently hang out in 196, a community that hexbear users wanted to join until they found out they couldn’t. Only then did the chasers and transphobia appear in their narrative.
Here are the instances I’m aware of. There might be more, I just saw these posts ambiently while browsing hexbear. And I also don’t know if the ones mentioned on hexbear are the sum of all chaser experiences users have had.
(Scroll down, these are all comment links not post links)
https://hexbear.net/comment/3826339
https://hexbear.net/comment/3772050
https://hexbear.net/comment/3775110 (see screenshot)
The two additional incidents linked in there (in post 1 and 3), were both actioned by a moderator, the user spoken to, and the behaviour hasn’t been repeated. The one in your third link was aimed at me directly, not a hexbear user, and occurred before hexbear federated with us.
So, 4 events in total, 2 of which involved hexbear users, and 2 of which occurred before hexbear federated with us. All 4 of which received a moderator response and communication with the user, which stopped the behaviour in question.
Notably, 3 of the users accused of being chasers are trans, gender diverse or gender questioning themselves. And I’m not going to kick a trans person to the kerb for behaviour that can be addressed by talking to them.
I’m probably straight but damn I might swap over to blahaj for that
I’m transfemme, and I was repeatedly misgendered as a “guy” and a “dude” by a user I warned the admins was transphobic. They ignored the problem completely.
Did you tell the user it bothered you?
I’ll say “see you guys later” to a group of women without a second thought but if one said it bothered them I would stop.
Hexbear recently federated with sh.itjust.works, I don’t know if it was polled on your side or what. But on Hexbear’s side there was a thread to discuss it.
Thank you for being one of only two people in this thread that actually answered the question.
You’re welcome.
Sucks for you guys. They caused nothing but trouble when they were still federated with Blahaj.
After so many of us complained about how they were being dicks and many on the instance weren’t feeling comfortable, hexbear decided to defederate from us first since they somehow said it wasn’t safe for their LGBT members to be on it.
Funny enough a few days later a new account started posting across different lemmy instances for days about how the Blahaj instance was anti trans and that the admin was too. Our Admin is openly trans :/
The whole argument started because the user said everything had to be political and wouldn’t stop insulting others who said they didn’t want to have every post on Blahaj to turn political.
It was just too perfect timing how a few days after hexbear defedarated for somehow saying the pro LGBT instance was anti-LGBT, that we got a brand new account attacking trans members while sayin they were anti-trans.
Enjoy your new people.
Hey, you’re talking about me! Yes, I was repeatedly misgendered by a user who claimed to be apolitical. Yes, I warned the admins that this user was going to be transphobic and they did nothing. Yes, I believe that trans people are capable of transphobia, because not every trans person knows every single thing in the universe about being trans.
deleted by creator
Isn’t at leat one of the admins there trans? Basic fact checking, people.
Trans people are capable of transphobia because not every trans person in the world knows everything in the world about trans issues.
Yeah, I thought of Caitlyn Jenner after
Opinion of one of the admins regarding hexbear, just so you guys know where they stand:
In my view, the hexbear community is actually a positive force on this platform. They are frequently abrasive, but they ultimately have the potential to contribute to what we are building here. They are extremely active and some of them are quite intelligent. But they’ve also become accustomed to a privileged position on their own walled-in platform, and they need to be reminded that their views are considered ver extreme by the average person.
and some of them are quite intelligent.
some of them
I mean, I guess 1/1,000 can still be called some?
Which admin specifically please?
Why is the only surprise here that this user was given an admin role?
Yeah, qtpie seems to have a very open federation stance, but they’ll follow the community’s will and aren’t responsible for hosting the server anyway.
Good, fuck him
Weird, simply saying that trans people that are finished transitioning aren’t trans… because they’re done transitioning… as in they’re now just a man or woman… got me called a bigot…
Like straight up, told that I’m a bigot and should not even think of speaking about trans people.
Some people over there also claimed that diseases didn’t kill native Americans. They claimed it’s “revisionist history” and they refered to the settlers as “shock troops”.
I’m just glad these people probably don’t go outside very much.
They added us to their whitelist.
Thank you for being one of only two people in this thread that actually answered the question.
You’re welcome. Most people were too busy complaining. Sync just added instance browsing and earlier I happened to be curious enough to check hexbear and saw the thread discussing it. Couldn’t find it when I went back to look though.
the title was edited when the vote finished, its this one
Lol I blocked the most annoying posters from hexbear on this thread and now there’s hardly any comments. I think we should put them in time out. Like defederate for 15 days. if they keep brigading, another 15 days. I don’t really want to defederate, but I hate this kind of brigading.
Can you define brigading?
Rhetorical question of course because I know you can’t.
You call it dunking. You know perfectly well what it means, and you being here behaving like you do amply demonstrates it even for people who have deliberate reading issues.
Using a congregation of users to influence a discussion unrelated to said congregation as a collective as opposed to individual users.
It’s like going to A random Youtube video and making it about the Rape of Nanking
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=rf93hqPoBByQcCPe
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Hey, nice bot you all got here!
that is from a different instance we added to the allow-list feddit.rocks … thanks kavin!
Raids are a fact of Internet life. “Brigading” is just some bullshit made up on Reddit. There’s not a single website outside of Reddit that cares about “brigading.” Not old-school forums, not 4chan, not Twitch channels, not Twitter.
Its so fucking annoying how much they whine about brigading
Because you dumbfucks prevent any legitimate conversation from happening.
Keep it up guys, soon no one will want to interact with you. Fuck yeah, trans rights! Trans awareness! Really pushing the envelope here monkeys.
This thread is literally discussing hexbear, and it also shows up in our all thread. By your own definition we are not brigading
I mean that’s fair, but what you’re doing is like going into a public library and throwing a rave party. You’re allowed in there, but the people are there for a different reason than you
Nah. People keep inviting them and then accusing them of brigading. They’re like a large group of rave enthusiasts from out of town that were sent invitations to all attend a rave and took public transportation to get there. Then, the people standing outside with “Repent” and “God Hates F****ts!” signs keep shouting that they’re here to corrupt the youth and they don’t belong here.
Dude, I had your people calling me a bigot because I said you’re no longer trans if you finish transitioning. Oh sorry, I forgot that I also said that trans people in sports is a complicated issue.
I don’t even really give a shit if they are, or aren’t, allowed to play sports. It has nothing to do with me. Words cannot express how little I think about this problem.
Your people act like that makes me a fascist and a bigot, make sure that EVERY ratio is in the hexbear users favor and then you wonder why you’re being accused of brigading?
Jesus christ what a shitshow. Ya’ll need to get outside and breathe something that isn’t cave air.
Top logic is at work today
Defederate forever, if people want that toxic people around they can go to hexbear or lemmygrad.
“Brigading is when people post in threads on the front page”
Real Redditor brain over here
No. They won’t get better.
Defederate now permanently.
I’m going to follow your suit and fill up my block list. I can’t take this anymore
Brigading is when people comment on threads which are visible to them, and the more they comment the more brigading-er it is.
Especially when the thread is specifically about them.
Yes and its very very annoying.
yeah people complaining about nothing gets real old
Hey, stop complaining.
Me, on Sopuli, watching the rest of the fediverse finally wake up to the fact that their instance admins sympathize with tankies:
I moved instance because of that
Pretty disappointing that @iamaqtpie is active on hexbear and says things like:
Please direct any seething that you may wish to do to the struggle session that’s well underway over here.
which reddit considered hate speech 🙄
Also disappointing that hexbear gets to vote federation, while we are left to federate to hexbear without a choice because the admins like the instance. Lame.
It’s clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it’s decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn’t this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn’t mean anything?
LMAO I got banned for this post
No reason given. Just “mod Banned”
That’s a highly suspicious use of a ban that I would like admin feedback on.
While your take about decision making is slightly wrong…
We’re federating with everything by default and use blocklists. Hexbear is fedetating with nobody by default and uses allowlists.
Basically, no action has been made by local admins for this new federation to happen.
We never had to defederate them before because they weren’t fedetating with us.The next step would be discussion then vote in the agora. I expect defederation to take a bit more than a week if the process hasn’t changed too much since last time.
That said, your comment isn’t anywhere near ban worthy and is a really bad optics on whichever mod was involved in that.
which reddit considered hate speech 🙄
here’s the whole quote, emphasis mine:
Hexbear is a Lemmy server that was created about 3 years ago as a new home for the former users of r/chapotraphouse. CTH was banned from reddit because
they were openly calling for the deaths of slave owners, which reddit considered hate speech🙄Why would you take this out of context, and what is your issue with the whole quote?
technically we were just expressing our support for US military action in the civil war and the song John Brown’s body. Which was an official song of the US army at one point.
We were kicked off for our American patriotism if you think about it
It’s clear that sh.itjust.works does not care to get community support in it’s decision making and we are left at the whims of the admins preferences. Isn’t this why most of us left Reddit? Because community say didn’t mean anything?
Make your own instance then, or move to another. That’s the lemmy solution.
Lemmy isn’t about having each instance be its own democracy, lemmy is about having lots and lots and lots of instances forming one massive network. These will always be privately owned by the people hosting them, so it’s ultimately up to them how they run their shop. However, the barrier to entry is relatively low, so you can quite easily host your own and be on exactly the same footing.
If you want to talk about community, then that’s literally what lemmy has instead of subreddits. That’s where the users make the rules. Granted, there aren’t sufficient mod tools to properly deal with anything - maybe when they introduce user-level instance blocking (coming soon ^TM ) they’ll also give us community-level instance blocking.
Nah I’m just gonna leave this instance and go to one where I don’t see you pedantic pricks
Good riddance.
Also disappointing that hexbear gets to vote federation, while we are left to federate to hexbear without a choice because the admins like the instance. Lame.
We are just better at democracy then you, sweety.
China isn’t democratic
When asked whether they believe their country is democratic, those in China topped the list, with some 83% saying the communist-led People’s Republic was a democracy. A resounding 91% said that democracy is important to them.
But in the U.S., which touts itself as a global beacon of democracy, only 49% of those asked said their country was a democracy. And just over three-quarters of respondents, 76%, said democracy was important.
https://www.newsweek.com/most-china-call-their-nation-democracy-most-us-say-america-isnt-1711176
Ya I will take the people of china’s word on this one.
yes and North Korea is democratic because it says they are.
More democratic than the US. The US has an electoral college system explicitly designed to make electing a president undemocratic. In Korea they vote for each equivalent of a cabinet position instead of letting the president just appoint all of them. https://www.ncnk.org/sites/default/files/DPRK constitution (2019).pdf
If this shocks you, remember that Americans are the most propagandized people in the history of the world
Way to compare one of the least free countries with… one of the least free countries.
now do Japan.
To the degree that Korea isn’t free, it’s is because they’ve spent their entire existence at war with the largest and most powerful global empire in history and have been cut off from international trade.
The US isn’t free because it’s a fascist state. The Korean peninsula isn’t free also because the US is a fascist state.
Now let’s hear your next vapid quip that’s supposed to mean more than objective facts and inarguable history, redditor. I don’t want you to lose even a bit of steam acting like you’re the smartest person in the room while displaying no knowledge about anything.
The average chinese citizen doesnt recognize feminism or talk about Tiananmen. The average chinese citizen relies on their Baidu feed to tell them everything about the world because the internet is heavily censored. The average chinese dreams of coming to europe to escape china. The average chinese person doesnt evem have access to clean running water. The average chinese doesnt even recognize cantonese as a language because CCP involvement. I dont think anyone should care about what an average chinese citizen thinks.
I pulled all of this out of my ass. Ive lived in china briefly, i wouldnt call it a democracy in any sense. Its a democratic socialist dream(heavy on the socialist).
You’re welcome to join hexbear, where this federation decision was voted on and we tried to make a space for people who are tired of the fediverse too.
bad take, we are voting right now in agora about this. Are you ignorant of it or just shit stirring?
I voted against it fwiw
Do you have a link* to the thread?
does a mini mean a link?
https://hexbear.net/post/458637?scrollToComments=false
should also tell you a lot why there are hexbears who are immediately assuming bad faith, y’all are federated with some dogshit people, its why I voted against it
y’all are federated with some dogshit people
Such as?
Seems like most of them either don’t like that we have an anti-lemmygrad community (which, honestly, TIL), or they don’t like that we have a noncredibledefense community.
Basically we have a couple anti-communist communities.
That’s the only reasons I saw in that thread that were actually related to our instance.
Thank you, those communities aren’t very serious so I didn’t even think of that. Users on the lemmygrad screenshot community do seem to be spending too much energy on something they dislike but that’s up to them. Better they have a place to contain it. As for the other, I’m still not sure I really understand it, but it doesn’t seem like anything worth hating an entire instance over.
ETA: those are communities hosted here though, that’s nothing to do with our federation policies. I guess their silence speaks volumes here.
Non-credible defense is pretty much just NATO- aligned defense/military memes. I could absolutely see some finding it offensive if the Russian/Chinese/Non-NATO military being competent and having good hardware is important to them.
But yeah, your edit was my point- I didn’t see anyone talking about who we’re federated with. Most of the people that voted no just didn’t want to federate with anyone.
My reservation was specifically that the MeanwhileOnGrad comm has a charicature of Xi Jinping where his skin is colorized to be yellow. I think that turning an Asian person’s skin yellow as a charicature is racist, and I felt that allowing that on a comm reflected poorly on the instance. I don’t mind that people hold different views from us (as many on lemm.ee and lemmy.ml do), but we don’t tolerate racism or bigotry. Despite that, I did vote to federate, in part because it’s such a small comm.
While not a subscriber to that community, I’m 99% certain that’s merely to enhance the Winnie the Pooh comparisons he notoriously hates.
Yes, upon reflection, them depicting an Asian person as yellow isn’t great, but I think the majority will see it just as Pooh.
While the comparison to Pooh originates from a meme in China, many of us would argue that the comparison in general has racist connotations especially when used in the West, and that that image is a perfect illustration of why we think that.
We’d also say that the Pooh story has been exaggerated pretty wildly, along with many redditor memes about China. Rumors can get out of control sometimes, especially when people get dismissed for fact-checking and accused of being bots or paid agents, and so on. Winnie the Pooh isn’t banned in China, as some might believe, and it’s pretty easy to verify that by looking at the website for Shanghai Disneyland or searching “Pooh” on any Chinese platform such as baidu.com or weibo.cn.
Winnie the Pooh comparisons he notoriously hates.
This is such a reddit urban myth, in reality I’d be surprised if he’s even aware of the comparison.
Also “it’s not racist to depict him as yellow, because it’s referencing another instance of us depicting him as yellow” doesn’t make it better.
Can someone else tag in on this answer? I’m too lazy to the good contextpost I saw the other day a and I don’t have the energy to articulate it myself rnwait I just realized, literally click the link and read about what our problems were in the thread where the whole instance gave their opinions on the problems
Also this is the second comment
which of these options will allow me to go back to posting about how much I hate my fellow crackers?
Death to America
I appear to be out of the loop. What’s wrong with hexbear? I’m not familiar with the instance.
They’re just an annoying bunch of wannabe communists who sound incredibly smug and post a ton of stickers in comments. Having said that I’ve moved to lemm.ee when lemmy.world defeterated from hexbear.
Gonna be real, your smug levels are pretty high right now yourself.
Wannabe communists
There’s a lot to unpack in that one. First of all, how do you even gatekeep being a communist? Surely you don’t hold a degree in Marxist-Leninist thought? Nor are you a hexbear yourself.
Or perhaps since you have this perception that we are all petite bourgeoisie (mostly white) in the imperialist core that we can’t actually be communists (ignoring how paradoxical that is)
Perhaps communism in your mind is only for the “orient” and global south. Those in the “West” must just be play acting.
When you guys mention the imperial core, what are you talking about? DC? Hollywood? Wall Street? Brussels? London? Paris? Berlin? The Hague? Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?
“imperial core” isn’t a phrase we made up. It refers to World Systems Theory, a theory of international relations invented by a guy named Immanuel Wallerstein which argues that imperial “Core” countries (think the traditional “developed” or “first world” countries. Mainly the US and Europe) have a particular extractive, colonial relationship with “Periphery” countries (think poor, raw material exporting, rentier states like Kyrgyzstan or Nigeria).
Then there are semi-periphery countries which are still tied into the imperial core in some way, but have enough sway economically and geopolitically to kind of stand on their own. They have a different kind of relationship to the imperial core, compared to the periphery (these would be the BRICS countries, largely).
That’s a gross over simplification, but hopefully that answers your question.
Edit: Here’s a really good explanation of World Systems Theory that goes into more depth
To be fair, colonialism is a human trait and it’s been proven in every large society time and time again. You think the current US/UK empire is bad but if you look in your own back yard it’s the same thing with a different spin.
It is inevitable, humans are destined for this. It’s unfortunate but it’s what we do.
You think the current US/UK empire is bad but if you look in your own back yard it’s the same thing with a different spin.
I don’t think any non-Western country has enslaved a continent, refused to pay reparations for enslaving an entire continent, and continue to plunder an entire continent of its resources.
Japan, China, Persian empire, Egypt, Spain, US, UK, Cambodia, et al.
History is nasty, our goal should be to learn from it and not repeat it.
yeah but the thing is other countries’ policies didn’t inspire apartied and the nazis and their holocaust.
the US’s exterminationist and segregationalist The US did those thing
Hitler wrote in his diary how good america was at genociding its undesireables, and took it and ran with it
The United States: world leader in being the absolute fucking worst thing in human history since 1619
But that’s kind of my point. The CCP engages in almost identical policies and political strategy. It’s just under a different banner with a different mascot.
That’s just the propaganda you’ve been fed. The world doesn’t need to be xenophobic or exploitative. These are learnt behaviors.
No man these are facts. Proven, hard irrefutable facts.
Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?
They prefer to be called The International Community™
Where is this imperial core you keep mentioning?
Probably start with where all the giant battleships come from: https://www.businessinsider.com/magnitude-of-us-naval-dominance-2013-11
Why does the USA need all those battleships if they’re not doing imperialism? Are they just cosmetic battleships? Just for shits and giggles?
They asked a question in good faith, and have since gotten it clarified. No need to be hostile.
I’ve grown up under a communist government in a socialist republic. So while I have no degree in Marxism-Leninism, I can assure you that all of my schooling was infused with it. Same goes for most of popular culture. I don’t despise communism, as is often the case with people like me, the idea is noble, if utopian. The ideology, like all ideologies, is scary for its intolerance and disregard of human nature. I will therefore gatekeep any pure ideolog, just to save my own faith in humanity.
I’ve grown up under a communist government in a socialist republic…
Huh? That’s a very roundabout way of describing a communist state. Where do you come from specifically? You can count communist states on your fingertips.
ideology, like all ideologies, is scary for its intolerance and disregard of human nature…
I don’t think that’s what the word “ideology” means. Also it’s dangerous and unproductive to off-handedly remark on “human nature.” It’s a bad faith psuedoscientific buzzword that’s rooted in uncontextualized historical analysis. Nothing happens in a vacuum.
I will therefore gatekeep any pure ideolog, just to save my own faith in humanity.
Again, I’m not quite sure what this means. I think you’re conflating a lot of things here that just don’t make sense and I dont want to make any assumptions about you. No community can ever be immune to reactionary politics, but thats not the same as rejecting “pure ideology”
What? You have nothing to say now? I would appreciate if you stated your position to my replies to you.
Lots of tankies from what I’m seeing, they’re the “alt-left” if you will, they believe in just as much weird stuff as the alt-right but are on the left side of the spectrum… Heck they end up meeting on many things…
Heck they end up meeting on many things…
name literally a single one or quit spreading this bullshit.
Being pro Russia, genocide denialism, authoritarianism, being hateful of ideas that don’t conform to their worldview, racism (just not towards the same people), the list goes on and on.
Hey, I’m a Hexbear user and I really think you have the wrong impression of what our site is. Idk if you’re open to reconsidering or if you’re just trying to get a few antagonistic words in but I’ll tell you my experience as a long time user:
Being pro Russia
Our site isn’t pro-russia. We just want the war to come to a swift end without any further bloodshed. Some people take offense to that because we don’t think the best way to do that is to send more guns, tanks, planes, dollars, etc into the warzone. That benefits no one except the arms manufacturers and the money lenders. Not regular people on either side.
genocide denialism
The only thing I can think of that you would be referring to is the “holodomor” or something similar that happened in the USSR. It’s not that we deny that many people did die in these horrible tragedies or that there wasn’t Soviet government involvement in some of them but that these very real events are being distorted for political reasons by people who want to paint the USSR in a certain, wholly bad, light. As communists (or anarchists), we try to be very open to criticism and new ways of thinking about or doing things but not when the intent is to do historical revisionism to make the people who liberated the concentration camps and ended the crimes of Nazism seem like Nazis under a different name.
Authoritarianism
Well, I guess this is true in a way. As revolutionists, we do seek to change the system by establishing a new authority with the capability to make this change. But have you ever noticed how the current system maintains and perpetuates itself? Sure, you can vote (and we don’t seek to abolish that!), but when that fails and working-class people take to the streets seeking change, why is it that people with guns and tear gas and riot shields try to stop them and maybe even imprison them? It’s not that leftists are uniquely “authoritarian” but that we want to use that authority for representing regular, working-class people and to bring about a better world where that authority isn’t necessary anymore. Our anarchist users probably have a somewhat different take on this but one of them will have to talk about it lol
being hateful of ideas that don’t conform to their worldview
Sure, there are a lot of ideas that we hate. But isn’t that everyone? I hope we could all agree on hating things like fascism, racism, sexism, transphobia, etc etc. Our users probably feel more strongly about that than most people lol but that’s just cuz a lot of us have been targets of those kinds of ideas. Other than stuff like that though… this site has been one of the most accepting places on the Internet in my experience. Sure, we argue a lot (sometimes too zealously lol), but just cuz we care a lot about getting things right. On our site, we don’t have downvotes to encourage users to actually challenge bad ideas and voice their opinion instead of just feeling satisfied having slightly influenced an algorithm.
racism (just not towards the same people)
This just hasn’t been my experience and I know most of our users would agree. Racism gets swiftly removed on Hexbear and lots of people replying challenging it. Do you have any examples? This has just been so contrary to my time on the site. Unless you mean jokes about white people but I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s not a problem lol
Anyway, I just want our instances and our users to exist together in peace. I know we have very “different” ideas from what is considered the mainstream in the west and on most of the English-speaking internet but I know our presence on the “fediverse” can be a positive thing and that we can get along. I hope this helps you to understand our site a bit better.
The whole “we want to end the war” argument just reeks. It stinks of russian propaganda. Russia started the war. They invaded Ukraine. Would you have the same viewpoint if the US was the invader? I’ve seen that comment several times and it kinda starts sounding like a red fascist dogwhistle
Unless by racism you mean racism but I hope I don’t have to explain why racism isn’t a problem lol
🤡🤡🤡
Can’t be racist against white people
Really? Go tell that to Jews… Or the Irish… Or Acadians (heck, french Canadians in general)… The list goes on and on…
Could you provide an example of Hexbears agreeing with the alt-right about something specific? I think a lot of people conflate “disagreeing with the liberal consensus” with “thinking a MAGA thing” when they’re really pretty different.
They are pro Russia.
Hexbear is very categorically not pro Russia, we’re just not pro West
I can’t hear you, the Arms Deliverys to Ukraine are to loud!
Fuck you people. You are pro China and Russia.
We are pro China, we are not pro Russia
Same thing.
Taiwan is a Country
you’re literally pro-nazi and you’re complaining about us lmao
Lmao go further supporting genocides.
You guys and the MAGA types seem to have very similar views on the Russia/Ukraine situation at the moment.
we want an immediate end to the war. in what way does wanting an end to the death make us comparable with the alt-right?
Calling for an immediate end to the war is dishonest and supports Russia
They can either surrender now, or surrender when all the able bodied people have been killed for no good reason. Ukraine can no longer win this war.
“Ukraine should surrender so that they can spare their civilian and combatant lives to Russia which totally won’t abuse their land and people as they’ve done in the past”
I had some conversations here. They were saying that north Korea is a lovely democracy, Russia is totally justified in Ukraine, and China isn’t doing anything to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Just some examples from yesterday.
Well. I think that thread gave me cancer. What a cesspool.
They’re coming here. They’ve all got their pronouns after their names, (which is actually a great idea) so it’s a little easier to tell them apart. I’ve got a useless thread with a few in memes@lemmy.ml right now.
It’s frustrating, because I have pronouns after my name and I dislike hexbear… a lot. It is a good idea to have users give pronouns and automatically attach it.
Their behaviour has made me constantly check if people with pronouns after their names are part of hexbear before engaging in any threads, because of the stress of dealing with them :/, sometimes I do engage anyway and immediately regret it /shrug
It is depressing, because normally using pronouns like this indicates trans supportiveness so I feel better about conversing with people with them on their names. Hexbear has ruined this because of their behaviour around all other topics and sometimes trans topics.
Just hope Jerboa gets instance-blocking features soon ;p, then I can block them on both my lemmy accounts .
OK, first time I’ve seen the dread Hexbear brigading in action. So, thanks, I guess?
Now I understand why they warrant defederation. I’m glad on on a Lemmy instance that defederated them, and suppose I’l have to find a kbin instance that does as well (apparently this one doesn’t defederate them if I’m reading this correctly?)
The irony is that, although I’ve been in the fediverse a while, today I literally made my first kbin account.
This post was created by someone from the sh.itjust.works instance.
Do a CTRL+F search for Hexbear Accounts, if you can’t find any, your instance is defederated from them
Calling this present thread a “struggle session” is dismissive at best if not downright insulting and I expect better from our mod team.
What’s insulting about “struggle session”? I will concede that it was dismissive, because I was dismissing demands for immediate defederation, which contradicts our decision making process.
Ehhh… I’ll try to assume the best here and just quote what Wikipedia has to say on struggle sessions.
If you read that and still think that’s an apt choice of words, then… idk? yikes?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
Struggle sessions or denunciation rallies were violent public spectacles in Maoist China where people accused of being “class enemies” were publicly humiliated, accused, beaten and tortured by people with whom they were close. Usually conducted at the workplace, classrooms and auditoriums, “students were pitted against their teachers, friends and spouses were pressured to betray one another, [and] children were manipulated into exposing their parents”. Staging, scripts and agitators were prearranged by the Maoists to incite crowd support. The aim was to instill a crusading spirit among the crowd to promote the Maoist thought reform. These rallies were most popular in the mass campaigns immediately before and after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and during the Cultural Revolution.
Regardless of where one stands on this particular topic, I don’t think this is a term we should ever want associated with anything, let alone our vote discussion threads?
The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.
Dismissal, and implying the discussion is a sham, coming from someone in a position of power… I mean yea, that’s kind of insulting? — not to me, but to the ideals of this place and the agora.I can’t really know your intent, and while I prefer to assume the best, it’s not really a good look.
I apologize. I acquired that term from hexbear users within the past month and I hoped to send them some kind of signal that our server was receptive to their users and not immediately hostile. Unfortunately, they still chose to be immediately hostile, so that didn’t work out. I was not aware of the derivation of the term, I thought it was just a zoomer term for a thread where people were flaming each other.
It actually gives me great relief to know that there is a reason why people were so upset about that term, and yet it also makes me ashamed of myself.
The discussion should be an integral part of the vote and decision making process and to me, dismissing it or shitting on in kinda stinks up the whole thing.
I completely agree. My assumption at the time was that the discussion was yet to unfold, and the thread I was linking was merely a flame war with no productive outcome. Which is technically true.
I shouldn’t have used that term without researching what it means, and I probably shouldn’t have agreed to federate with hexbear in the first place. But I wanted to give them a chance, because I believe in leftist ideals and I hoped they could help us.
Honestly at this point I feel like just leaving Lemmy entirely, because I’m trying to guide this community and it’s just an uphill battle that I will never win. Things have gotten distinctly more tedious in the past month, and I was hoping hexbear could inject new life into the rest of Lemmy. Now, I worry about whether there even is a viable path to relevancy for us.
I appreciate the fact that at least you gave me the benefit of the doubt, unlike many others.
