Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you'd think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there's some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
I genuinely don't understand why this person is complaining about wild leftist posting when midwest.social is also an explicitly leftist server. Maybe I'll come to eat my words, but I really don't think you guys are that out of pocket, and there's usually just as much effort-posting as PPBs. I just don't see the problem.
Edit: the_itsb@hexbear.net has been created - that instance is hopping, I will not miss the party 🥳
I really don't think you guys are that out of pocket
Thank you. Most of us are pretty chilled out back on Hexbear, I spend my time trawling through news articles and trying to understand shit and many of us do the same. But as we are so surrounded by liberal talking points and views (in real life, with our families and friends, at work, or online on reddit, youtube, etc etc) that tend to be the most infuriating combination of a) utterly smug, b) utterly unquestioned, and c) utterly incorrect, and our origins were battling liberals on Reddit until we were banned, we tend to get a little frenzied when somebody comes along with a point we disagree with. Given that many - maybe even almost all - of us used to be liberals that got bullied and dunked on by leftists on that subreddit or on Hexbear, we generally believe in the power of insulting+educating (insulducating?) people into submission.
Every single one of us genuinely wants to create a better world, free of poverty, where everybody has a home and food and healthcare, without that requiring exploitation of people at home or abroad, for every demographic (except capitalists and fascists, but nobody is born either of those things). So our anger also comes from the frustration about how far away from these things and how liberals and liberterians and conservatives are so maddeningly dismissive of those things like "Yeah, that would be nice, but there's a little thing called ECONOMICS" (as if many of us haven't read many books on economics and history from experts old and new) or are like "That can be achieved with the profit motive and if people just worked a little harder!" and are so hyperfocussed on individualistic solutions rather than trying to implement systemic change.
And also American propaganda about other countries. Which I and others are especially attuned to due our aforementioned time spent going through western media in the news megathreads.
But as we are so surrounded by liberal talking points and views [...] we tend to get a little frenzied when somebody comes along with a point we disagree with.
And as our brain trust likes to point out back at home base, the fact that we don't have a downvote button means that there's no such thing as 'downvvote and move on' with us. We our disagreements. We
The thing we've been seeing is that most of these people are recent migrants from the reddit API drama and act like American tourists with little regard for the local culture. OP here has only been on the site for a month and they're already acting like they own the place. Also their baseline is tainted by spending so much time on a website utterly flooded with with US centric mainstream propaganda and bots and censorship of leftists, so when they step out of that place they receive culture shock from an explicitly leftist community (and just about ALL of the lemmyverse was before the influx overwhelmed them) that doesn't have that kind of manipulation.
people who refuse to disengage when asked are pretty much the only people who get their posts removed by our mods, aside from fascists, transphobes, etc. we certainly badger posts we disagree with, but it's not nice to do it when you've been asked not to!