Middle one is how I started. Apparently lemmygrad was so "bad", that two of the instances I joined defederated it by default before anything else. I was like "Tankies, huh? I wonder what kind of nonsense stuff they like to post." So I lurked on the front page.
Hey that's similar to me. Except for me it was reddit and I heard r/latestagecapitalism talking about "Chapos" and the "Dirt bag left" in hushed whispers but never saying why they were bad, so I checked them out and my first though was "Oh finally, some leftists that don't want to play nice with the right"
Similar pipeline here. Hanging around in all the I suppose you could call them "utopian left" spaces and being patted on the head "you'll wise up when you're older" followed by a "refutation" of whatever I suggested that itself demonstrated that they hadn't actually listened to a word I said. Even some ideas I explored by advocating for them and later decided were flawed, it still burns me that people who otherwise accepted me as a reasonably intelligent person would take an idea I shared with them so lightly as to not listen. That primed me for the "if you aren't going to participate constructively in good faith then you can fuck off" space that was CTH
Same, I even told a friend when telling them about Lemmy that "Lemmy has lots of... something called tankies? No clue what it means but I hear they have bad beliefs."
The world didn't make any sense to me. Browsing hexbear for a couple days was like finding the other half of the puzzle pieces inside
Neat! That's why I'm not too worried that they spread these memes about us (it's a meme in the original meaning, where they start believing what others tell them without checking for themselves) because people will still check us out. And there's no risk of getting your instance taken down on Lemmy, not like Reddit where you always had to be super careful about what you said and walk on eggshells.
you know what I'm thinking btw? I was browsing lemmy servers on join-lemmy the other day and noticed there's an instance for the r/blind subreddit, and they will federate with everyoneexcept Lemmygrad lol, probably someone told them something they heard from someone else about us. Hexbear should federate with that community and start politely interacting with them.
either that or they're turbo libs because they're even federated with exploding-heads, so maybe someone could just ask them why they specifically single out lemmygrad.