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.
Their stated goal is to disrupt conversation to deny "shit libs" a platform. Users who do this should be banned as trolls if they continue, IMO. Unfortunately they seem to get special protection on lemmy.ml, perhaps unsurprisingly.
Lemmy was never yours to begin with but also where did we state this "goal". Thats straight out of lemmy.world's paranoid ramblings about us that have no basis in reality.
What threads? I'm looking at the Hexbear front page right now and the only thing I see is a user suggesting we don't use PPB outside of Hexbear. Not a single post about lib-dunking.
Hey, yaknow what, I think we're going a little hard on it too actually. Not necessarily with volume of posts. I think anyone can post as much as they want, there just happen to be a lot of us, we're opinionated, and we were just let out of our cage, and some topics that we happen to have strong opinions on happened to be posted just in time for that, AND then someone posts something like this where they literally ask who we are and what we are doing. I think at the very least you can agree we have a right to respond to this right?
But with some of the aggression and things like pig poop balls. Yeah, I think we've probably gone a bit hard on it and I try to engage with a little more good faith.
But I'm still wondering where we stated this "Goal" you said we stated.
These meta posts I personally don't give a fuck. Stretch your legs, grab a drink, whatever. It's every worldnews thread since federation which has been filled with literal pig shit, which apparently counts as "alternative opinions" or whatever helps you sleep.
I'm not seeing the connection between dunking on libs and denying them a platform. If anything lib-dunking requires that they have a platform so we can continue to have new takes to dunk on.
OK I went to the front page of hexbear > local and there's only one thread that says "dunking on libs" and its someone being BORED of that and wanting to just chill. There's a couple posts in our dunk tank using posts made in other instances as material which I dont think you should have a problem with because it focuses our energy THERE instead. And those were there before federation. The dunk tank is just for anywhere we find opinions we find laughable.
Honestly, the rest is stuff that I'd hope you'd be on board with as a thread, like being mad a black Chik-Fil-A worker was sent home for dying her hair blonde.
I won't deny that my comrades enjoy "dunking" though. But like, what you said in your original post isn't that. Its not us having a stated goal of wrecking your site or whatever. Its not a vast conspiracy. You said there was a stated goal and that just doesn't exist. Is paranoia.
Edit - Probably what's most misunderstood is when the term liberal is applied. Not at all times they mean the Democratic Party and its supporters.
You don't need to be a Big L - Liberal to uphold liberalism. Republicans can uphold liberalism. Tory supporters can uphold liberalism.
It's an ideology tied to extreme individualism, reformism, those who can believe society will progress through individual action, devoid of any stances combating activism.
For ex: individuals who want women to be in the same position of power as men w/o questioning the oppressive nature of these positions of power that oppress women from the working class. Under liberalism: Thatcher, Melania Trump, Giorgia Meloni are Girlbosses. Does this ring true to anyone?
Liberalism as an ideology propagates the idea that if given "equal opportunities" in life, then it is up to people to grab those opportunities to have a better life.
But we understand that hard work is not enough because if so, then hired hands and workers should be rich by now, but they are not.
Because exploitation exists, oppressive systems in our society exist. That's one of the many limits of liberalism as an ideology. it has no class analysis.
Liberalism depends on reformism to advance a society, but reformism is not enough. You see news about social democracies backsliding into fascist politicians. But these social democracies also rely on poorer countries for their raw resources for their welfare states to run(like gold and tantalum and Libya bombing thing). Until how long can we reform a broken government?
Just last night I also found myself explaining the misunderstanding around the term "liberal" to someone else who was talking as though they thought we were using conservative talking points because we were using anti-liberal language. I would bet we'll be seeing a lot of that now. Here was my attempt to clear up the misconception:
Just so it's clear, OP isn't drawing a distinction here between amerikkkan liberals and conservatives. A lot of times when leftists complain about liberals or liberalism, people who aren't exposed to leftism will mistakenly take this to mean that we're pro-conservative. We are NOT pro-conservative.
When we talk about liberals, we mean in the broader sense of people who subscribe to the philosophical tenants of liberalism, or in other words, people who think that capitalism is a good and/or natural thing. To us, conservatives are pretty much just a subset of liberals who have even more reactionary opinions about certain social issues than the standard liberal. This misunderstanding isn't the fault of the people who misunderstand, mainstream media depicts all politics as being a binary battle between the dems and the GOP, a sport where two teams face off and that's it. But in much of the world, "liberal" is actually synonymous with right wing and that's how we use it. In the US, liberal tends to mean "left wing" but only because the overton window is so grotesquely far to the right, and anticapitalism isn't even a consideration in US politics.
Forgive me if you already know all this, but because we're seeing new people around here due to federation, I think it's a good idea to point this out and avoid the possibility of conflating our utter contempt for liberalism with any sort of positive view of conservatism.