Can we defederate from hexbear.net?
I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.
I am formally asking hexbear users to stop participating in meta posts on other instances.
Thank you.
Unless they start brigading heavily or cross a line in terms of the communities they house, we won't be defederating them.
Their own communities are, quite something, but their admins have told them to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance, and so far, they seem to be doing that
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem. They can't seem to help themselves with the brigading and they do seem to be drowning out local opinion with tankie rhetoric and spam.
EDIT: Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
EDIT 2: I was initially pretty excited about federating with hexbear but I think after seeing the effect it has on the overall tone of discussion I'm pretty disappointed.
Not having downvotes does not, by any means, mean you need to post your disagreement. Our instance also does not have downvotes. You ARE drowning out exactly the sort of discussion this community is for. I can guarantee what you would like to say has already been posted and upvoting those posts and moving on IS the appropriate way to handle this issue in a meta community for an instance you are not a part of.
I mean, i’d rather have this conversation with their input.
And yes, they have opinions. Opinions with which I often disagree. But recently my largest annoyance on Lemmy has been the “why are you intolerant towards bigots” contingent, not the hexbears.
So, we don't have downvotes and haven't for years. If I want to disagree with you, I have to respond, and I disagree with you. I'm not intending you harm by my reply, but, we're on a forum, what am I to do but post?
We just like to post a lot
We're one of the oldest instances and have a ton of extremely active users. This post is about our instance and appeared in our feed, why wouldn't some of us respond to it?
We don't have downvotes because some asshats were targetting trans posts(those asshats were purged) so we comment when we disagree.
we just post more than everyone else
you've gotta keep up
I think the fact that they’re more active in this thread than the blahaj folks is fairly emblematic of the problem.
It's a thread about us, so . . .
tankie rhetoric
My valiant neoliberal argument. Their insidious tankie rhetoric.
Just pointing out that if this were a blahaj exclusive thread you would get a very different sense of where popular opinion actually stands.
You can see the instance of the poster, can't you? And it's not like hexbear people are able to downvote posts, so our vote is (while still something) relatively weaker.
tankie rhetoric
I see this post on my front page. I come in and comment. Many hexbears do the same. We just post a lot. No "brigade" necessary.
Tend to agree.
That's good to hear! I like getting blahaj posts in my feed ::: spoiler spoiler
:::Have you been in the news communities of late? Any time Russia/Ukraine comes up they're flooding it with Russian apologia and silly emoticons.
It’s not Russian apologia. It’s just pointing out that Ukraine is not a smol bean like the saturation by western media and Reddit lackeys have painted it as.
Yeah the "whAt AbOuT UkraInian FASciSm" thing is pushed really hard over there.
to be on their best behaviour when engaging in communities outside of their instance
They weren't in Lemmy.ca, got defederated for shitposting, and being trolls over there.
Yep. Excessive spam of the pig poop emojis, brigades and harassing people. Shadow made the right choice kicking them out
This aged poorly lol
I stand with and support whatever you choose to do. I just thought I’d bring it up. Thanks for all you do!
My only complaint is the popularity might be crashing our instance lol, but they are cool.
Hexbear is really queer friendly and polite. It's also one of the few actual leftist spaces on here after the homogenization of lemmy.world and lemmy.ml. The main goal I've interpreted from Blahaj.zone is to be a queer-first and affirming space on Lemmy, so one has to prove that Hexbear is a large enough systemic threat to Blahaj's members to warrant defederating.
I don't think I'd describe hexbear as polite, they seem to get pretty rowdy, even antagonistic at times. Otherwise I agree though. It would be a shame to cut off one of the largest queer friendly instances out there.
We're polite when met with good faith, next time you see hexbears ask them a question about their beliefs or whatever is going on, a clarification, a tangent, whatever. Just ask a real question (not a bullshit weighted question designed to be a landmine) like "could you tell me more about X? I don't agree, but I haven't heard about that before" and you'll get polite and friendly responses (usually lol)
And yeah we get pretty rowdy and antagonistic at times like when we tell people to fuck off for throwing a fit about pronouns (which we did, then we banned them, then we made pronouns on Hexbear mandatory lol). That's how you protect your community from reactionaries, racists, and bigots
As someone else said, how are they queer friendly when they vehemently support anti-LGBTQ+ countries?
They also support Cuba, a nation with the most queer affirming family code in the entire world.
China has slowly been making life easier for queer people in the same fashion as the US (slow, very gradual changes decriminalization for example)
By this logic the EU is explicitly anti-queer because Poland is an EU member state which houses the most regressive policies in the entire world ("lgbt-free zones") Yet Poland is not sanctioned, nor cut off from the EU.
The US has hundreds of anti-trans bills and the supreme court recently struck down legal protections for queer people (this case was also entirely fabricated to game the court system). Florida exists.
Not to mention the solidarity we should show to queer people across the globe. Pinkwashing history is not a solution.
My issue isn’t with their takes or politics. My issue is the vibe. Maybe it’s because I’m older, and I want to have maybe an actual conversation with someone without having to deal with comments that consist of a pig pooping.
To be clear, when I said that it feels like t_d, I didn’t mean the political takes. I meant the edge lording and name calling. Granted, it’s mostly in their own community, but if you look at some of the behavior of their users here you’ll see what I’m talking about, and it’s leaked into other communities too.
Hiya! So, we do get pretty intense sometimes, but it comes from a good place and we love having extensive discussions about stuff, answering questions about our beliefs, why we believe them, etc. We'll be happy to talk about it until after the heat death of the universe in fact. We do not tolerate bigotry of any kind and when we encounter it we do not hold back, so yeah, the intensity is warranted and necessary. We're also good at smelling when someone is bullshitting us, because we've had to deal with people trying to fuck with us for 3 years. If you're being earnest and you say as much and ask questions, you'll get good faith interactions. Interesting and educational ones too, I'll wager
It can often get tense with them and I don't agree with some of their takes, but they are definitely a voice to consider seriously and worth arguing (in a polite way) with.
Unlike those conservative right echo chambers, most of them are actually educated, historically literate and smart, and they actually provide sources for their claims instead of hand waiving and using every falacy in the book.
The problem is that they are in support of regimes which are currently or historically anti LGBT+. There is no further discussion to be had. Even if they claim to be whatever, they are against us. Their ideology is incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives.
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+. You would fight against that for the same reason you fight against Nazis. The ecological politics or so are irrelevant at this point. Even if you agree with that, don't forget that they want us gone.
This is so close to the Nazi bar problem and I fully understand why defederation might be the best course of action. Personally I don't know what the right call is, but I blocked the instance using the Connect app anyway.
I actually view the rainbow-washing of us foreign policy as a big part of the problem- It allows reactionaries and conservatives to express bigotry and persecute LGBT people under the guise of being "anti-imperialist" or resisting western influences.
Fuck corporate pride and rainbow raytheon shit, America has historically been extremely shitty to gay and trans people and it makes me sick even being associated with their 'foreign policy'. Just because they 'legalized gay marriage' via decree 8 years ago, doesn't mean they've not done real genocides in the past to LGBT people, and aren't laying the groundwork for doing it again in the future (eg Florida).
Allies marched gay people right back into the concentration camps when they liberated them, for example:
I'd urge you to consider the fact that we are explicitly, radically pro-trans. Our mod team is over half trans people and our userbase heavily skews that direction as well. I myself am trans. And I'm a communist, partially because of the experiences I've had as a trans person living under neoliberalism. I didn't start out as a communist, I slowly drifted that way as a result of learning, specifically learning more history. I'll recommend the podcast Blowback here, I think all 3 seasons are really good, well-researched, informative, and entertaining. They give a lot of context to various US actions abroad and it's a very approachable podcast. Season 4 is coming out soon and I can't wait!
Also, check out Cuba's family code if you want an example of a communist country being extremely socially progressive. It's cool and good!
I mean, a lot of us are pro-Cuba, which is AES and has some of the most progressive family policy in the world.
Also, your "historical" thing is just really hard to process. After all, standards change. Hell, within the "West", LGBTQ+ acceptance is barely 40 years old (and often, as we see, under attack for the gains that have been won). Was the US in the 90's really that much better for LGBTQ+ folks than the USSR before it collapsed? And while not LGBTQ specifically, the situation of women in the USSR was far superior to the West - especially in STEM..
This doesn't mean that we can't (and shouldn't) judge the lack of LGBTQ+rights in the past -- we can and should. However, Cuba's family policy shows that there's nothing inherent to communism that's "incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives."
In summary (and here I'll post my only emoji, since there's the bug),
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+.
Communist countries generally speaking are better on lgbtq rights for their economic development.
You can't be a capitalist and be pro-lgbt. Cuba, a marxist leninist democracy, has the most lgbtq rights in the world.
Also the reunification threw back lgbt rights in east Germany decades.
The stasi were assigned to defeat subversion by lgbt activists. Their recommendation, which was followed, was to give the activists all the rights they asked for.
historically anti LGBT+.
This strikes me as a silly way to complain about Cuba, since for the other AES states you'd probably just say "currently," but today Cuba has the most progressive family code in the world, maybe in world history when talking at the national level, along with other merits regarding state support of HRT, etc. We all recognize that the early ban on gay marriage was an error, one for which Fidel Castro himself apologized publicly and encouraged the reversal of!
hi, i live in capitalist florida and my human rights are worth about as much as week-old dogshit. if you're pro-nato or pro-u.s. then you are anti-lgbt rights
as an interesting note of comparison, china, while historically quite bad on trans issues, has been making pretty impressive strides as of late, even opening their very first gender clinic (for children) a few years back
idk what you're going on about "their ideology is incompatible with lgbt rights" a plurality of people on hexbear are some variety of gay or trans or both (like me!). i'm pretty sure a solid 70% of our userbase would commit a murder with their bare hands if it could meaningfully improve the station of lgbt people even a single iota
your entire comment is very ignorant. ironically it's probably closer to propaganda than anything you'll see on hexbear
hexbear, with a mod team that is 50% trans, a user base that heavily skews trans, has the largest collection of trans emotes I've ever seen on any website, and enforces pronoun tags, is anti-trans.
this does not make any sense. you are writing off an entire community based on foolish (and provably false) preconceived notions.
This is a good way to put it and one of the reasons I'm so perplexed about how queer the instance is. I genuinely don't understand how LGBTQ+ people can simp for regimes that simply want to/wanted to murder them.
And before someone jumps in with "but America/the West/liberals are trying to do the same thing"... if you don't think it's easier being queer in the US, even with all the problems, than in Russia or North Korea, I just don't know what to tell you.
Posting a reply I just wrote elsewhere:
I'm trans and know people that live in China, their conditions are basically the same as the USA, but slightly better these days because they don't have a hate mob spreading lies about them in the media and trying to genocide them in select states like America does. In general, there is next to zero awareness about transness in China, whereas the opposite is true in America (they are highly aware and full of hate about it), so it is a different flavor of bad in that regard. The emphasis the government has on accessible affordable housing and food makes that aspect of transness easier than in America, though, the trans women I know in China all have their own safe place to live in.
Now Russia... yeah... they're doing what those American states were doing federally now. But Ukraine does similar too, unfortunately. Source: I'm Czech and can read/speak most slavic languages by virtue of that, I also have been part of an illegal network to help trans/queer refugees leave Russia and Ukraine. In this organization we would typically help people move to Prague, St. Petersburg (for people who cant leave Russia, this is the best choice of city), and in the east, to China, particularly Shanghai and Harbin (large russian community there). Language barrier and cost of living are huge factors in where we'd help people move. ::: spoiler spoiler
the US is historically anti-LGBT and it's currently undertaking a genocide of trans people in red states.
That's... not the kind of debating I've seen them do, but sure. As far as reasonable debate goes: if you have to brigade and spam, you've already lost. What exactly the message was just doesn't matter.
It's certainly the most trans friendly place I've encountered bar none, the original CTH helped me realize I was trans
you'll never find another instance as trans friendly as hexbear.
if you need to cut allies off to avoid getting trolled idk man, that seems lame.
you’ll never find another instance as trans friendly as hexbear.
You mean other than the one I admin right? The one that your users are currently brigading
You don't even have pronoun tags for users fam
They’re not my users, they’re our users, comrade.
I'm sorry but I don't understand how commenting under a post from an instance we're federated with is considered brigading. It's not like we're posting about/linking to a separate space to infiltrate. Our communities are under the same umbrella, so this just shows up in our feed.
Are people from hexbear jumping into a discussion that should maybe primarily be reserved for blahaj? Maybe, but I think people just want to offer our side of things, and we honestly just don't want the two biggest queer spaces in the fediverse breaking up because we're often edgy and argumentative/passionate about leftist beliefs.
I also don't think we're derailing from anything or preventing you from having a defederation conservation among yourselves just because we leave replies.
They did use the word "another instance" on this instance, so there might be some language ambiguity that is being misread.
Edit: also it appears you host vaushites on this instance, so it appears the way you interpreted it seems correct.
So an instance can go berserk, but as long as they're trans allies, they can stay? Nah fam, cut out the cancer and they can go elsewhere when they realize they're cut off. There is no such thing as a saving grace stance when they're posting total shit. The good people can and should migrate, while the cancer site dies. That's how this whole concept works.
blahaj federating with hexbear literally does not affect you
Hexbear leans meme-tankie but on the flipside they’re very supportive of queer people. I don’t agree with them on everything, but I don’t feel unwelcome there either, so I personally disagree with both defederation and the comparison to T_D.
It’s not their political stance or my agreement or disagreement I think makes them like t_d. It’s the general vibe of most things I’ve come across. It’s a vibe that’s very edge-lord. Like “if you’re offended by me talking about that’s you’re problem” kind of vibe.
FWIW, I’m very leftist and actually agree with a lot of the stances I see on there, which makes it worse. I pop open a comment section and go “oh goddamnit” and block another community.
I mean I'll admit my bias as a politically-minded leftist, but I like them. I don't agree with all their takes, but it feels like a positive way to poke some holes in the echo chamber a bit.
I've had only very positive interactions with hexbear users. They definitely have their own vibe within their communities from being unfederated for a while, but I don't see why that is a reason to defederate. If you don't like hexbear comments sections then just... don't open them??? Do you even want to be in the fediverse?
Hexbear has the highest proportion of people with neopronouns in their names that I've seen on the entire fediverse, and for that reason alone I would prefer that they stay federated.
But the brigading, harassment, disinformation campaigns, bad faith arguments, and excessive emoji spam aren't a problem? Those reasons alone are why they need to be defedded. My instance did so yesterday and the site has been all the better for it.
almost as bad as the_donald though
I made a lot of these! ::: spoiler spoiler
almost as bad as the_donald though
correct, hexbear does not have enough trans emojis
You forgot
Don't compare us to the_donald just because we're not libs. I'm trans, just also a Marxist Leninist.
Hexbear is more trans friendly than the majority of trans places, honestly. The reason for this is the mods defer to trans users on what counts as transphobia, half the mod team itself is trans, and offensive posts are removed quickly before they can affect other people. I'd say its more trans positive than here, based off what I've seen. There are chaser comments that are left up even in response to moderators and admins on blahaj, these would be rapidly removed on hexbear. Plenty of trans places, this one included, also are not very good at weeding out people that are being sneaky about their transphobia and chaser habits, which can poison the well. And not only do the moderators of hexbear do good work, the dev team specifically goes out of their way to program ways to make trans users feel more comfortable (e.g. the universal pronoun tag system).
As a trans woman that is also a survivor of abuse, jokes are made all over the internet about sexual violence and its very hard for me to avoid upsetting my PTSD. Hexbear actively removes these sorts of posts rapidly, too, and even removes borderline cases like bringing up SV out of context and without content warnings. For these reasons hexbear is the main site I visit, no other site or community really comes close.
That's fine, as a person in nearly the same demographic group, it seems there are 20 people willing to spam a thread with pictures of pigs, concerning imagery with fascist roots and be generally disruptive to the site as a whole, for every level headed person.
I like the way hexbear moderates, but the people affiliated with the instance are growing more and more toxic as time goes on. Is an instance responsible for its user's behavior? No, I suppose not. But I've had to block 50 or so accounts on lemmy to be able to navigate politics and news without constant image spam, and they all come from hexbear.
concerning imagery with fascist roots
? what is this exactly. ive been on hexbear since it was founded and havent seen anything like that. the emojis are much smaller on hexbear itself, there is some sort of bug where that doesnt transfer to other instances, many users have been made aware and we now try to spoiler tag the emojis.
the only thing i can think of were the cute little ghost pictures that the falange in spain created, but the lgbt community in spain and hexbear adopted as a 'fuck you' to the fascists. its like taking back the word queer.
I defederated my instance.
I thought lemmy.ca's justification pretty compelling. They are self-avowedly more interested in trolling, harassing other users, and crapping on other people’s politics. They don’t even make a secret of it.
It’s unfortunate because they do seem really queer and queer-friendly. But they seem to be totally uninterested in doing anything other than dunking HARD on anyone to the right of Lenin. So… passing on seeing that, personally.
Lol 2 of 4 points was malding at PPBs
They're the kind of far-left types the rest of us should avoid being associated with because they ruin all of our image in the long run.
crapping on other people’s politics.
idk, I think neoliberals on lemmy often (not always) lean this way as well with the "bot" this and "tankie" that and "genocidal" the other thing. Surely, even if you agree with one or all of those, you can see how it fits "crapping on other people's politics"?
I thought this was a bit overkill, because they seemed well behaved for the most part, although a bit annoying every now and then. But this comment section shows exactly why we probably should. They're so combative and seem to completely dominate the discussion.
If anything the amount of comments are proving how many trans people are on hexbear, and splitting the trans community for arbitrary reasons is just a bad idea
There being many trans people says nothing about how good or bad it is. While we should ideally stand together, the behaviour of quite some hexbear users is honestly incredibly annoying. Us defederating would be a consequence of their actions. These are not "arbitrary reasons". They're brigading a lot of threads, constantly derailing the discussions with all kinds of whatabouttisms and overwhelming all other voices.
This very thread should've been a honest conversation with other blahaj users, instead hexbear has taken over everywhere and is leaving no room for opposition. Before this thread I honestly wasn't against them, but today I've been noticing them derailing threads everywhere.
Yeah, I came into this thread expecting to defend letting blahaj be federated with hexbear, but I'm left seeing a comment section being armwrestled by hexbear users, when this post should really be predominantly blahaj users weighing in on the pros and cons, and the impact of hexbear onto our instance.
Some of the users takes on the CCP are garbage, but a few garbage opinions doesn't warrant defederating.
Edit: You know what on second thought let's defederate. There are a lot of tankies shilling for countries that hate the lgbtq.
Just so you know, CPC or communist party of China
as opposed to CCP, or Chinese communist party,
is what they call themselves, and does not have certain racist connotations that CCP does.
I'm trans and know people that live in China, their conditions are basically the same as the USA, but slightly better these days because they don't have a hate mob spreading lies about them in the media and trying to genocide them in select states like America does. In general, there is next to zero awareness about transness in China, whereas the opposite is true in America (they are highly aware and full of hate about it), so it is a different flavor of bad in that regard. The emphasis the government has on accessible affordable housing and food makes that aspect of transness easier than in America, though, the trans women I know in China all have their own safe place to live in.
Now Russia... yeah... they're doing what those American states were doing federally now. But Ukraine does similar too, unfortunately. Source: I'm Czech and can read/speak most slavic languages by virtue of that, I also have been part of an illegal network to help trans/queer refugees leave Russia and Ukraine. In this organization we would typically help people move to Prague, St. Petersburg (for people who cant leave Russia, this is the best choice of city), and in the east, to China, particularly Shanghai and Harbin (large russian community there). Language barrier and cost of living are huge factors in where we'd help people move. ::: spoiler spoiler
And the excessive brigading.
They aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be but some of them really are too combative. I’ve seen them get into arguments with people for not being the correct type of left I don’t know how to respond to them because I’m not a polisci or world history major.
I’m also pretty tired of those huge emojis. The pig butt thing was funny maybe once. I don’t know what the right answer is I’d just wish they would chill.
The emote problem seems like it'd be really annoying, I've stopped using them when I'm not on hexbear communities (though sometimes I forget what instance I'm on sorry in advance).
As for the "wrong type of leftist" sort of stuff, hexbear tries to be a big tent community for leftists (we've got all sorts over there although it's admittedly heavily leaning towards marxist-leninists) and it tends to be a much more welcoming site outside of those overcrowded threads on active where everyone is arguing.
Hopefully the chaos will die down soon enough.
Can you help me see the appeal of hexbear? I took a look before knowing any of this stuff about the instance(saw it in everything and had a look around). Reading how some users describe it (pro-trans, inclusive, not a US echo chamber) and being LGBT, having a trans husband and poly, and finds pro capitalism stuff kinda tiring I thought it would be a good fit for me but...as I look at posts on hot and the comments I see a lot that makes me uneasy.
Comments about how a user was talking with "euro trash". The impression that if I'm not pro Russia then I must be pro America is something I see in the few Russia/Ukraine posts I read through.
Like..I'm very much anti capitalism and while I don't know how far left I go I can't understand how the community can say Ukraine should surrender to save lives and not become a US puppet when surely they'd just become a Russian puppet instead?
If what hexbear users say about the friendliness and inclusiveness it sounds like a group of people I'd love to chat with, but with what I see when I go there myself I just don't see it. Yeah I haven't seen any antilgbt of users but that's kinda it
Just sort by Hot. :)
You're gaslighting when you say it's a "big tent community for leftists". I block any Hexbear community I see as it's only people trying to "dunk on libs" while also saying they should "get up against the wall".
You're part of a toxic community and then come here and try to paint it as peaches and rainbows.
Hexbear is one of the biggest left unity instances on lemmy
Oh, well that’s nice to hear. Whatever I saw was probably an exception, and not the rule then.
😔
I've had some interesting and insightful conversations with people from Hexbear for the last few days. However, we did reach a point where people from Hexbear started defending the Taliban and North Korea. There are tankies on Hexbear. Probably a lot of them. It's something people should know.
I've been on hexbear for 3 years and I've never seen a taliban fan
I assume they were talking about this interaction:
The US fled Afghanistan and the Taliban won. Mind you, while I don’t like the Taliban, it’s better for them to be in charge than the colonial occupier the US had been trying to act as for 20 fucking years. If there is to be hope for Afghanistan in the dilemma between the Taliban and US, we must agree that the local force that actually has some stake in the country doing well is the better option.
Hardly a defence of the Taliban's ideology or methods. As for the stuff about DPRK, well... libs gonna lib.
maybe they meant one of our langley-based fedposters.
I wouldn't be surprised if you start to get bad faith actors signing up to your instance to intentionally wreck your reputation.
However, we did reach a point where people from Hexbear started defending the Taliban and North Korea.
I think that was just me and what I was saying -- which you are wildly misrepresenting -- is that I'd rather the Taliban be in charge of Afghanistan than the US, because with a local government rather than a colonial government there is a much better outlook for positive change due to local sentiments (and protest, etc.)
As I told you then and will repeat: I do not like the Taliban. This isn't about "liking" anyone, it's about the US colonial occupation not being a model for anyone in the country making progress except for a small handful of compradores.
The problem is you like the Taliban oppressing the people of Afghanistan more than them having a representative democracy where they govern themselves. The Taliban denies woman basic human rights like access to education. It cuts the heads off of political enemies. It's performs cruel and unusual punishments on prisoners. It imposes its version of Islam on everyone. This is not desirable. The idea you would blow this off with nonsense about colonialism is absurd. Local rule is not somehow inherently desirable. Going out of your way to rationalize authoritarianism is tanky behavior.
The only "support" for the Taliban would be us saying get the amerikkkans the fuck out of Afghanistan. A pretty uncontroversial statement.
Also to give back the money we stole from them that's exacerbating the famine there.
It's hard to image a more controversial statement. America was never going to be able to stay forever, nor did most Americans want to be involved, but the outcome Afghanistan got was hardly the preferable one.
love too support the US narrative
On the one hand I am not mad to have different ideologies here but they seem to go out of their way to pick fights which is pretty grating for what is supposed to be a memey, supportive community. Also whenever someone points out a one negative thing about a communist country they seem to counter it by saying a western country did the same/worse, which isn't wrong but doesn't address the point? If they could just accept a fault here or there it would go a long way in seeming less aggressive.
If you'd like to know our reasons for doing that (or anyway, my reasons), they're twofold. First, even with the rise of China and the seeming return of global multipolarity, western countries continue to dominate world affairs, militarily and economically. It's simply a matter of scale; when they act up, it's likely to effect the lives of millions of people around the world, directly or otherwise. Second, most of us are ourselves westerners, and of those I'm betting most of us are from the the US. As citizens of these places, our first responsibility is to point out our own nations' crimes, both because of their widespread influence, and because of our proximity to them.
There's also the matter of communist countries being the subject of a truly absurd amount of western propaganda. We feel the need to push back against certain narratives about the supposed crimes of communist countries because we know many of them to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and at times outright fabricated. Most of us are close students of history, some of us like myself are even academic historians, and it can be frustrating to provide reams of evidence for our claims (or more often, counter-claims) and be met with accusations of whataboutism, rather than earnest engagement. It's why so many of us are quick to assume that the pushback we get is in bad faith, because it quite often is.
But anyway, I'm getting off track. Very few of us, I find, are unwilling to acknowledge the flaws, missteps, and yes, even crimes of actually existing socialist states, when they are well evidenced. For instance, I doubt many of us would defend the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, but we're equally unwilling to accept the Holodomor as an example of deliberate ethnic genocide because the common narratives surrounding it rely on fabricated numbers, misrepresentations of Soviet state policy, and Nazi propaganda, to say nothing of their denial of professional historical consensus.
they seem to counter it by saying a western country did the same/worse, which isn't wrong but doesn't address the point?
western countries are typically higher in every respect on the HDI and yet they often have the same/worse problems as a less developed communist country. then people from said western country flock to criticize the communist country for said problems and offer only token acknowledgement of these problems in their own country. when called out on this, they reveal a superficial understanding of how the problem manifests itself in either country and withdraw to rhetorical redoubts of 'criticism is never unhelpful' and 'i also criticize my own country (but i criticize the communist one a lot more)'.
do you see how this might come across as frustrating or hypocritical?
I think you both present a great explanation for the hexbear method as well as simultaneously a tiny improvement: we can follow up the criticisms of the western countries with a quick "so the problems manifests deeper than youre saying"
I'm also fine with how we do it tbh, just trying to always improve when possible.
Also whenever someone points out a one negative thing about a communist country
These accusations are frequently false or meaningless (Cuba has the most progressive family code in the world, but we can't expect it to spearhead every social issue all the time), but you might like some thoughts that I fielded on an alt account to humor a claim made by a liberal who wouldn't have been worth the effort if I couldn't repost the thread other times like now:
The problem is, they're not actually arguing in good faith. They're here to call people neolibs, spam, and pick fights. It's not about ideology, it's about a group of people who only want to cause trouble.
When you blocked it, why should you do more? Everyone who wants to block it can do so, you don't have to force your preferences on others
When that instance is brigading and shutting out any other conversation, blocking them isn't going to cut it. It still shuts out everyone else who hasn't. They're being actively harmful to the site through their actions and don't participate in good faith. lemmy.ca defederated with them yesterday because of this.
Lemme know how it goes. I've been asking for this for ages, but my admins won't listen
I had never heard of that instance before opening this thread and ooh boy do I wish I hadn't. I have known these kinds of people for a long time, I've been these kinds of people (for a thankfully brief period). Just in this thread there are hexbear users doing the usual tank schtick of goading people into political discussions and calling them neolibs. I can see why some might view them as a neutral or even positive place to have around given their apparent progressivism towards queer people and their mod team being largely trans, but I really don't think that really makes any difference. You can slap some pride flags on it all but ultimately if you drill down deep enough into the beliefs of any group that proudly calls themselves Marxist Leninist you're going to find some truly ugly shit. And it's not just the obvious stuff like having to hear how progressive Cuba is, the stances they take on oppressive regimes always leads to some kind of war crimes/genocide/ethnic cleansing denial, and where they're self aware enough to not outright deny they will deflect. I can see why from the perspective of queer western people this might all seem a bit esoteric because a lot of them will attempt to dance around the issues but they are there and a lot of people with familial connections to this stuff that do see it for what it is. And before any of their users get excited I'm not going to engage with your shit, I've seen you, I've been you, I know your shit and I don't fuck with it. If you just scroll through here you can see the neolib name-calling and tankie memeing/totally ironic (probably) propaganda, they have zero self control. The blue and pink ain't fooling me.
this is a very vague post, and frankly i strongly doubt you were ever a communist given your basic lack of understanding of marxist principles, there is zero reason to lie about such things.
also im trans and am a czech communist so... it is incorrect to assume that everyone from formerly communist countries hate communism. and i obviously have strong 'familial connections' to communism, many of my relatives were partisans that directly killed nazis that invaded our home. it is my experience, at least in czechia, that the communists are the most likely to be LGBT friendly out of any political grouping, and i strongly believe that eastern europe would not be the homophobic cesspit it is now if it remained communist.
Gotta second that, I have similar 'familial connections' to partisans in Greece, the UK/US directly helped the monarchofascists back into power after the war. I often wonder what it would have been like for LGBT people in Greece if tens of thousands of communists hadn't been killed on desert islands thanks to US foreign policy.
Hexbear is an explicitly left unity platform, MLs included.
Ffs I was a long time /r/chapotraphouse user and even tried to use the website after the sub got banned (nothing against it even, just didn't really have enough of my interests to really keep me) But y'all gotta admit this is pretty fucking embarrassing. Like this is a instance meta post on a pretty small, very explicitly pro trans leftist instance, do ANY of you think you would have actually been defederated in the first place? Like genuinely, do you not think you would've just had people like me say "naw they're chill". But instead you put an odd couple hundred comments on this thread when the biggest in the little bit, has about 40? And get this, it's also a thread a defedding from an instance, but actually deserved it, and our admin had already been on the case? Embarrassing.
Big time edit: This was the comment I had originally typed out, and while I still believe quite a bit of it, I'm kinda disgusted by the amount of Russia apologia and pro war sentiment generally. But let me guess, I must be pro nato?
I’m kinda disgusted by the amount of Russia apologia and pro war sentiment generally.
Where are you seeing this. Do you have links? I've seen people mentioning this a lot but have never seen any of this content personally.
i've been filtering hexbear's communities from my all feed with uBO^1 because of the tankie vibes, but outside their own communities hexbear people seem to behave themselves reasonably well. considering lemmygrad is defederated i can expect them being defederated as well just because of the politics, but they don't seem too brigade-y to the communities here.
to be fair i've been blocking all the politics and politic-adjacent communities left right and center so perhaps i'm just not seeing the bad parts of hexbear, but shitposting wise they seem alright.
the only real gripe i have with hexbear is that lemmy's handling of emoji in general suck and man do they like their emojis. but that's a software issue more than anything
We defederated lemmygrad? Why?
i’ve been blocking all the politics and politic-adjacent communities left right and center
How?? Please tell me your secrets. My kbin "blocked" tab now covers three pages and I barely feel like I'm making a dent.
i've also been blocking manually as i come across them. i guess what we consider politics-adjacent is different enough that it seems to work for me.
i'm also considering filtering out a few common news sites but i haven't done anything of that sort yet.
as for my secrets, i have these https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1633853 ready to go but those are pretty lemmy-only so they probably won't help you there
It's exactly the same vibe as the donald and the users are just as bad as the Donald users were.
You don't even go here. But also that's literally wrong because The Donald is racists and transphobia and they are neither of those things lmao
Personally I've filtered the instance in Sync, but that doesn't work for comments. I hope there is a feature for it soon, for I don't care for Lemmy enough to bother with these morons.
They're being defederated in several places now, so hopefully they won't be such a problem anymore.
I'd second this. I've gone through and blocked most of their communities manually but they definitely threw off the vibes. They're not a fun bunch to be around.
You can filter out instances with Ublock Origin for desktop and Sync for mobile. This will remove any posts and comments from users from that instance. It's a lot easier than trying to get your instance admin to defederate a major instance or setting up your own while still getting rid of hexbear for you
Sync can't filter out comments though.
Thanks for mentioning Sync can do this. I have been wondering about this since I first joined for the various nsfw instances (didn't want to blanket block NSFW posts)
If I may ask, how do you do so with uBlock? Haven't found any info on filtering instances as a user
seems like its home to a lot of irony poisioned predominantly white leftists but i think comparing it to t_d is a stretch.
i wonder if theres any leftist instances that are worth spending time on, theres not very many of them and it seems like the ones that are out there either have started to die out or have been widely defederated from due to toxicity.
i wish there were larger spaces focused around real world political action, organization and solidarity because there would be so much value in having that on a platform like this.
How about slrpnk.net?
I mean... most things I see on the FV is fairly left-leaning. It's effectively all a "leftist space" (and I'm saying this as a non-American who's voted as far-left as I can for the past few elections) except for that one sad cunt posting stonetoss (explicit transphobic and probably other -phobic) "memes".
leftist space has a specific meaning that goes past the political positions of the userbase averaging out to be progressive. lemmy for the most part is somewhat left leaning, although there’s definitely an abundance of right wing and liberal users, but my point is it doesn’t have many open spaces dedicated to activism or on the ground work since the majority of communities that are left leaning are more preoccupied with out of touch online discourse than real world action
Idk, but if you're a person of color, don't go to tankie instances because they're seriously racist over there
show me a single example of racism on hexbear
Well there's plenty of comments in the modlog being racist against Chinese people. Though funny enough, they're all coming from anti-"tankies"
This is objectively untrue. The only place you'll see racism is in the modlog, with users being banned and comments being removed.
I, too, enjoy telling blatant bold faced lies
if anyone is reading this and wonders what this could possibly be about, here's @YaaAsantewaa's rap sheet on hexbear.
turns out they were banned for racism after making comments like
Now you have easier access to information and can make informed decisions about racist troll poster @YaaAsantewaa@lemmy.blahaj.zone in the marketplace of ideas!
I posted a horrible video of a deeply disturbing event that happened in Kenya because it matters to me and it upsets me to see things like that getting brushed away like it's "no big deal".
You were were asking me for proof that China has a racism problem and is attempting Neo-Colonialism in Africa trying to mimic European Colonialism
So I provided proof
Now you're following me here for some reason making throwaway accounts. This is the issue and it's why I'm telling people of color to stay away for their own safety and mental health
Yeah fuck those guys
I've been blocking individual communities as they pop up in my feeds.
I wish there were an easier method for this (like via the vertical "..." kebab menu) without having to click into the community directly.
Let's chill on the defederation unless it's really bad for a while.
My opinion is please defederate. Thank you.
I'm hoping it won't have to come to defederation. If the users are too disruptive that's understandable. Perhaps they'll chill out in other instances following this backlash and federation will be viable.