Cause fuck them thats why.
It appears they use putting your preferred pronouns as a litmus test for users on their instance; recent years have well demonstrated this is a bridge to far for sizeable portions of the internet and meatspace alike.
So my guess is there's something to that.
On the Internet, pronouns should be irrelevant, just use they/them or "the OP" if needed. The only time pronouns are needed imo is for actual, personal discussions. If you need to refer to a poster that's not the thread poster, you're probably using lemmy incorrectly.
If someone posts them and I bother to look, I'll probably try to use the correct ones. Otherwise I'll just avoid pronouns and use they/them if I really need to.
So requiring it just makes it easier for me to tell someone is from hexbear and is more likely to post stupid emoji than actually post something interesting (that's been the case so far), so I don't think much of value would be lost if we defederated. I'm against defederation though, especially since it's so easy to detect.
I'm 100% in support of the lgbtq+ community, I just don't think we need pronouns on the Internet. Just make a community rule to avoid pronouns instead, especially since there's already a stupid culture of assuming everyone is male on the Internet. Moderate that and people will adapt to gender neutral language on the Internet.
Probably not necessary, no. Though they allow for the pronoun to be anything so it could be username/username and that would be fine as far as I know.
Disallowing pronouns via a community rule probably has as much of a counterproductive aspect as requiring them. Make it a rule and you get users reporting users for failing to use gender neutral language. It's the same effect but inverted I think.
It's always been a sort of opt in type thing at best. If you want to declare them go ahead. It just means some people will insist on honoring it and others will insist on dishonoring it, because rarely are pronouns actually relevant to a typical conversation: they're just a metric of how polite or respectful people are willing to be with each other because, well internet. Hopefully most people recognize it as it should: no big deal.
People don't have the same reaction if they affix a Mr. or Mrs.to their username, interestingly enough.
Honestly striving for gender neutral language is great but we found that people would use gender neutral pronouns to avoid people's preferred pronouns which is - at minimum - sus as fuck if not outright bigoted behaviour which we don't tolerate. We see ourselves as a community, and as such are made of people who have various preferences. Since we see each other as people we all want to respect each other properly when addressing each other, thats why we all have our pronouns in our names.
That seems to be the case. I see Hexbear on sh.itjust.works's list of federated instances but sh.itjust.works doesn't appear on Hexbear's list. It would have to be fixed on Hexbear's side.
Also the libs in this thread shaking in their boots over Hexbear will never not be funny.
When you realise you're a meme-grade stereotype, don't you feel a little....small? And sad? Especially when the opposition you meet doesn't fit the stereotype you've projected on them? Because that means you're playing fantasy role-playing with yourself. Which must be a bit lonely?
