What's the deal with hexbear.net users

They have a zero-tolerance policy for political viewpoints that differ from their own. That becomes a breeding ground for an extremely toxic echo chamber.

What had me block the instance was how the majority of Hexbear posts and users I was encountering initially was how annoyingly spammy they were. Acting like Lemmy was Twitch chat, spamming giant ugly reaction stickers everywhere, literally behaving like 12 year olds.

Then I also started to notice the far-right authoritarian simping buried under all that chaos.

I have been doing the "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" book club at menby@hexbear.net recently which has been my only real interaction with hexbear. The book club has been great so far and if anyone wants to talk about feminism and masculinity should join.

There are a lot of in-group signaling across their own users which mostly shows up with acronyms, specific phrases and calling everyone comrade. This hasn't been that difficult in the book club which is long form text and discussion and everyone is respectful and nice. That being said I have blocked a few communities at hexbear because I have found them annoying and taking over my feed. So like everything here at Lemmy I had curate my own experience

It's a combination of tankies and some more level headed leftists. They do have a decent proportion of OK users and the occasional decent meme, but the frequent genocide denialism and too many tankies have resulted in a lot of blocks and bans.

I fucking love hexbears. the weekly trans mega threads are my favorite place on lemmy.

At the same time I have probably blocked more hexbears than any other instance's users. I don't enjoy fighting online and just block anyone who is remotely aggressive or who i see bullying others.

I rarely see blocked users in the trans or other hexbear megas though (my client shows when a blocked user posts just not the name or content). I think there are some who use the server to argue their political positions from but it's definitely not the majority.

I don't blame anyone who can't abide the more ornery ones but if you ignore them the rest are just lovely and willing to share a lot of knowledge.

Nope, just good ol' fashioned communists! Beware the red scare!

Hexbear isn't being paid for anything, they are largely made up of Anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. Hexbear has been unafilliated with Lemmy for years before integrating with Lemmy a year ago.

You might be seeing their zero tolerance policy for liberalism in action, but if you genuinely want to know what their users are about, just visit it. Just hop on over to Hexbear.net and scroll the news megathread and whatnot, try to understand what's going on.

Finally, I want to question why you believe anyone would be paid to mess with Lemmy, moreover when the lead developers are aligned fairly closely on ideological lines. If they were here to "cause chaos," why would the devs support them ideologically? To ruin their own network? That narrative is just a wild hypothesis.

All responsible server admins have them defederated. Hate speech and genocide denial, that is almost certainly against the law in Canada, Germany, and other places. We defederated lemmygrad for the same reason.

They were founded after being kicked off reddit, then self isolated from the fediverse for years, creating the echoiest of echo chambers. It's like those Appalachian families that were so isolated they basically developed their own culture, language and all. They've spent too long "struggle sessioning" together and driven out any of the more reasonable users with their purity tests. They think they're the "true" Lemmy users and only refederated to "spread the word" and antagonize all the "liberals" (read: anyone that's not 100% with them). The one thing I dislike about my server is that they haven't defederated from that place.

Bunch of 14 year olds. If not physically, mentally

It's where r/chapotraphouse went after it got banned from reddit.

Thankfully those of us on world have not had to deal with them for the better part of a year. There's so much wrong there it's kind of hard to know where to begin.

All I will really say for now is that they are perfect anti advocates for the things at the surface level they advocate for.

!meanwhileongrad@sh.itjust.works

Just block people you don't want to interact with. My instance isn't even federated with Hexbear but there are still people fitting that description. And plenty of folks there didn't fit that description.

you should go ask them

Demented illogical people. Also angry and bloodthirsty. Best to not interact. Waste of time.

The fringes of the political “wings” (left and right) seem similar to me, not so much in policy but in the rabid, simplistic attitudes and outright derision constantly sputtered.

Are you new to the internet?

I just don't get all the anti-hexbear hate I see on other Lemmy servers. Questioning your mainstream/western/capitalist beliefs and arguing about it shouldn't be ground for blocking them. I have yet to see any egregious behavior from them. Sure, I see somewhat outrageous takes on their own hosted communities, but have yet to see them cross the line on other servers.

Different instance, different ideology.

Example: there used to be a nazi insrance called exploding-heads.com (or was it .net?anyways, doesnt matter), basically you just dont interact with them, eventually they got defedersted by many instances.

Lemmygrad and Hexbear are Marxist Leninists, the same ideology of USSR and China. Get it now?

If you disagree, just block their instance in your user settings.

Unfortunately, blocking an instance in settings don't block their users from commenting in other instance's communities. So you gotta either (1) use an app to block the users too, or (2) find an instance that defederates them.

Can't say I've noticed a problem tbh.

They like to argue So I've seen

Daily dotworld self-soothing thread.

Russian slash communist pieces of shit. Life is much easier if you just block hexbear.

Inb4 tankie I think hexbear is pretty cool

I think you just want to be protected from opinions of others and you call it chaos because your mind can't handle it.

And what's even more interesting, the more sheltered you live your life, the more chaotic you will think the world is.

Good news is that if you stay on Lemmy.world, you will be protected from it. :)

Hexbear is sweet. Those people care more about the average human than liberals could ever imagine. If you dont understand them, try learning instead of being confused forever. I post this knowing I'll get dunked by .world, but this is what solidarity looks like.