I've been there, but I mostly just do it anyway. Fuck it, I said what I said. Half the time you don't even get anything all that cutting, it's just png salad. Every now and then, you'll get a coherent response that isn't a death threat, and those end up being good reads more often than not.
Eh, more often than not their longer posts are just "actually Stalin/Putin/Mao/Kim dynasty/Trump good because <5 page essay>"
Edit: also the classic "comparing Stalin to Hitler is a form of Holocaust denial" and in the same breath calling everyone not in their vatnik bubble a nazi or fascist lmao
And of course, if you don't address every single point in that 5 page essay, along with doing all of their required reading, then you're clearly acting in bad faith and a shitlib and are now going to be dogpiled by 27 other Hexbear users.
Bro I had this commie from lemmy.ml post a meme advertising for how great communism was. And I told him how the state was authoritarian and basically didn't care much about human rights and the millions of people starving to death. I got wall of text and he got upset when I used wikipedia as a source. I'm sure if I used some news outlet he'd just say that's western propaganda so I ended up blocking the guy and later the instance.
Nobody on Hexbear is pro Trump, unless they're saying something like "this thing he said is pretty funny." Also double genocide theory is a form of holocaust denial and one thats wormed its way into the average person's beliefs about the Soviet Union and should be called out when its engaged in, whether that person is doing so knowingly or unknowingly.
Within the mythology of East European nationalists, particularly but not exclusively in the Baltics and western Ukraine — where there was massive local participation in the actual killing of Jews, usually by shooting at local pits rather than by deportation to faraway camps — the Bogus moral equivalence of the Holocaust has been from the time of the actual massacres the myth that the Jews were all Communists and got what they deserved because Communism was every bit as genocidal as Nazism. Hence what the Jews call the Holocaust is a kind of opposite and equal reaction to the first genocide, the crimes of Communism.
When you say that Stalin was as bad as Hitler, you are participating in this. You can criticize Stalin's crimes and failures without equating him to Hitler.