Hexbear Discussion Round 2
Hexbear Discussion Round 2
I figured since their admin has asked them to stop participating over here it may be worthwhile to get a new discussion going that is primarily blahaj. I'm almost certain they'll still be upvoting so keep that in mind as that may skew things. Worthwhile to check in from instances that have already defederated them. The previous thread definitely left a bad taste in my mouth but what do y'all think?
Old thread can be found here
EDIT: With regards to the post on new federation guidelines here: https://hexbear.net/post/352119
The current top comment is:
Every instance that has talked shit and got dogpiled should be thanking us for breathing some life into their dead and boring ass websites.
After speaking to one of their admins and seeing the change in the rules on hexbear, I'm happy enough with the outcome.
Trans solidarity is incredibly important. It's the reason this instance exists. I prioritise that.
Hexbear (and Beehaw) is one of the only Lemmy instances that genuinely prioritise the protection of their gender diverse users, and honestly, if for nothing else, I believe it's worth a bit of discomfort to find a way of staying connected.
0Trans solidarity isn't beneficial when they're also brigading, harassing and abusing people, and disrupting threads constantly. They might be allies in terms of LGBTQ, but they are actively harmful in every other way.
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Hexbear is... a lot. It really does feel like they swarmed the last thread. I wish there were a way to lock threads to the local instance.
They seem to really take glee in harassment of "liberals". Their justification of "if we are harassing you you deserve it" doesn't hold a lot of water for me, because they seem to harass anyone who doesn't think the exact same way as them. I certainly get the hostility towards liberals, but while that's all well and good in their little quarantine zone over there now that they're in the larger Threadiverse their whole "dunking on libs" thing just makes lemmy an exhausting place to be.
And then they turn around and mock everyone for being bothered by their hostility. I want to like Hexbear, but I'm not sure whether they're good federationmates.
I hope we don't have to defed, but if Ada decides to it'll certainly be earned.
1I think they need to be defederated. Many users over there seem to be very edgy and tankie. I also saw too many very upvoted posts from this instance with bad faith arguments, idiotic takes and strawmen, with lots of users supporting this crap
1Where in the blahaj rules does it state that you must be squishy and also be a supporter of the deadliest, most antisocial and most destructive economic system humanity has ever seen
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I feel like every time I see a comment from hexbear, it's a tankie with the most insane take possible. I often see them use their emotes/memes not to add to a conversation, but to deflect or avoid directly responding to criticism. I also keep seeing entire comment threads taken over by hexbear as soon as one of them replies to someone. Almost like a bat signal goes out to call in reinforcements. I'm sure that's mostly a product of them being terminally online and not necessarily malicious, but I have to block like ten hexbear users for every one I come across that isn't like that.
It's worth noting that most of the hexbear users I see are under politics stuff posted on large instances like .world and .ml, so these issues may be less prevalent or even non-existent on posts hosted on blahaj.zone. But fuck I really hate the energy they bring on. Honest to god I almost stopped using lemmy altogether because of how bad it gets under most of the posts I come across. I'm sure a lot of hexbear users are fine, but I don't like constantly blocking half of a comment section because the tankies came out of the woodworks to say some dumb shit about Ukraine or whatever. I doubt I'm the only one constantly blocking tankies from hexbear.
I'm mostly posting this to see if others feel the same way or have had similar experiences. I've searched for posts about hexbear a couple times over the past week and haven't seen one until here right now. I'm going through the first post from two days ago and it seems like I might just be coming across a very loud minority from their instance. If that's the case, then defederating seems extreme and unnecessary. But if this is just what most of hexbear is like, I'd prefer to defederate and let the non-tankies make a new account here or on another instance that we federate with.
Update after two days: I'm officially casting my vote as "defederate from hexbear please god," final answer. The tankies and trolls are exhausting and I'm sick and tired of dealing with them. Either they can't be reigned in or they simply aren't. It's not even just their politics. Now that I've been thinking consciously "is this comment's bad politics indicative of the whole instance" I've noticed that a lot of people from hexbear are kind of just assholes. I don't want to deal with them anymore. "The good ones" can make another account here or somewhere that we federate with. But honest to god, most of their instance is a drain on my mental health and I can see that I'm not the only one from blahaj zone that feels that way.
I know they come off as trans-friendly, but they also let tankies run defense for authoritarian countries that don't treat queer people like me well. If hexbear keeps up like this I'm just gonna stop using lemmy altogether. Logging on isn't worth the excruciation of dealing with their instance. I know Ada wants solidarity with other trans-friendly instances, but I don't think the tankies and trolls at hexbear care about that, and I don't think the rest of their instance cares enough to get them to chill out. It feels like they're taking advantage of blahaj zone's charitability to keep vomiting authoritarian apologetics and brigading any comments or posts that call out that behavior. Dealing with that isn't what I signed up for.
In the interest of transparency, this comment was at 38 upvotes when I added this update.
1Almost like a bat signal goes out to call in reinforcements. I’m sure that’s mostly a product of them being terminally online and not necessarily malicious
In the case of the last defed thread, it was because someone posted a link to one of my posts in their "dunk on libs with shit takes" community.
That's the issue I raised with their admin. The admin deleted the post in question and made changes to stop it happening again.
Going forward, it's going to come down to this. If they dogpile on any blahaj lemmy community, or any external queer or trans communities frequented by our users and impact the ability of blahaj members to use those spaces, we'll be talking defederation again. I'm hopeful that it won't come to that though
0I’d be suspicious of drawing those kinds of subtle lines in the sand. Malicious groups savor those kinds of guidelines so they can dance around them and test their firmness.
The spirit of their dialogue is designed to be disarming, giving them a foothold in this community. Their chosen behaviors and methods of influence are not what I want to see in a virtuous fediverse.
Maybe this is because I have a guarded heart after being burned a lot, but if you’re giving someone “one more chance”, that’s a good sign you’ve given them too many chances already.
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First comment for me, but I've been a blahaj member since the migration. When I learned about hexbear, I was really excited because I lurked r/cth back in the day and always liked their content a lot. I'm a GenX queer anarcho-syndicalist who is terminally irony poisoned and moderately online, so it's basically my people.
So I spent a bit of time looking at what they've built over the last 3 years and it was impressive. The reasons behind the mandatory pronouns are fantastic. As a cis person (sorry), whenever I specify my pronouns, it's an attempt to normalize specifying them so that it isn't just for trans people. That's why they added them in hexbear, and when they did that, it outed a whole bunch of transphobes and shitty people, who were then removed from the instance. Sounds like good praxis to me. Seeing cynical interpretations of that sucks.
They also don't allow downvoting, same as us, for many of the same reasons.
What we're seeing right now is a culture shock because they've only been loose in the fediverse for a week, and the folx over at hexbear are having a struggle session about it. They've been in a bubble for a while and they seem to know it They didn't know their emojis were so big, they're working out guidelines for engagement, they're trying to rein in the users who are getting too aggressive (including admins and mods DMing people).
It would be really cool if we at least gave them a couple more weeks to get the hang of things. Their communities are easy to block and the instance as a whole is very value aligned with blahaj. Queer and leftist unity is important.
0Being harassed and called a lib for criticizing their dogpiling doesn't feel like unity to me.
1Not minimizing that at all, a lot of that wasn't cool, but it was a handful of users from a very large instance, so it wasn't necessarily the fault of the whole instance. They're having internal arguments about that last thread, and many of them feel gross about it (notice they aren't here this time). They're also gonna have some new users who are too eager to dunk on libs to think about it for 5 seconds - a human problem, not an instance one.
Editing to add this link https://hexbear.net/post/353633 Wherein hexbear tells us all their universal safe word, and links to their code of conduct.
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I will summarize my views that I left on the first thread:
- While I do not agree with mandatory pronoun marking, or with needing to have one's neopronouns approved, the number of Hexbear users with neopronouns in their names indicates that the instance is extremely pro-trans and inclusive of all non-binary identities.
- Ada has very poorly handled the response to her "people of NATO" statement in a way that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth regarding the administration of Blåhaj Lemmy. I have noticed that a comment left by a Hexbear user saying "death to Nazis and transphobes" is gone now as well, which if this was an act of a Blåhaj Lemmy administrator, further reflects poorly on Blåhaj Lemmy's administration.
- For as much as I've enjoyed some of Hexbear's communities, such as !transenby_liberation@hexbear.net, Hexbear users have often been weird, annoying, or wrong as well. However, I do not think that being weird, annoying, and wrong is cause for defederation, and would prefer that defederation be reserved for illegal content and neo-Nazis, lest we create a culture that is hegemonic in its beliefs and values.
- The ideal solution is for individual users to be able to block Hexbear, but this appears to only be possible using uBlock Origin and half-possible with one of the mobile clients for Lemmy. Until this becomes a feature of Lemmy itself, I believe that Hexbear should be defederated if this is the will of a majority of Blåhaj Lemmy users.
I will also state that I am biased in my views due to the fact that I am an anarchist who doesn't use the word "tankie", I am very strongly opposed to respectability/civility politics, and I am very careful about SIFTing every bit of news that appears on my feed. For these reasons, my experiences with Hexbear and its users will be markedly different from those with differing views or social media practices, a number of whom report experiencing "harassment, brigading, disinformation, and bad faith arguments". I am sure that these people are being honest, but I can only speak from my own experience.
Lastly, I would like to note that I read that a number of Hexbear users were opposed to federation to begin with, due to the potential disruption this could be for the site's culture, and as Hexbear's culture (e.g. emojis, which improperly scale on other instances) are taken to other sites. It is therefore my conjecture that some fraction of Hexbear users may be intentionally going against their admins' words and being annoying on other instances specifically in order to get Hexbear defederated. I do not fully understand Hexbear's culture or site politics, so I would prefer to hear from Hexbear users on this matter: since this thread is local-only, Hexbear users may wish to send me a DM explaining the controversy on their site regarding federation, and if my conjecture has any merit.
I may edit this comment with other thoughts as they come to me.
Edit: I received this DM from a Hexbear user regarding federation politics on the site. I am sharing this with his permission. I will create an audio version upon request.
Relevant links in the DM:
@JohnBrownsBussy2@hexbear.net also sent me a message reading, "[...] Also, it looks like our admins have posted new rules concerning federated conduct. Some people are being grouchy about it, but I do think moderation is going to improve: https://hexbear.net/post/352119?scrollToComments=false"
0Ada has very poorly handled the response to her "people of NATO" statement in a way that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth regarding the administration of Blåhaj Lemmy
What I was trying to say is that wishing death on people is not acceptable, but wishing for the downfall of organisations is perfectly acceptable.
If that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, I don't know what to tell you.
And if the bad taste in your mouth was because you thought I was saying something else, or that I was trying to make some sort of implicit comparison to terms like "people of colour", then hopefully this clarifies things, because it wasn't any of that.
1or that I was trying to make some sort of implicit comparison to terms like “people of colour”, [...]
Honestly that just seems like people reading too much into things, even though "people of NATO" is still a really unusual and imprecise phrasing. If English is your second language and it was sort of a heat-of-the-moment edit, then phrasing things oddly is understandable, and it's really bad that people were assuming ill intent just because of unusual phrasing.
Anyways, sorry if I've been too impolite and added too much to your stress, you do good work overall (and if this seems like groveling, sorry about that, too) — I'm not going to change my views, but it's also probably best not to keep prodding at such differences, in your den. I wasn't aware of this unwritten rule when I signed up and I'll make sure to respect it regardless of how I feel about it.
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Ada has very poorly handled the response to her “people of NATO” statement in a way that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth regarding the administration of Blåhaj Lemmy. I have noticed that a comment left by a Hexbear user saying “death to Nazis and transphobes” is gone now as well, which if this was an act of a Blåhaj Lemmy administrator, further reflects poorly on Blåhaj Lemmy’s administration.
I really do not think it's fair to go after Ada about this. I think this is such a weird hill to die on.
0If you say so, but I just feel like this reflects on a broader issue I've noticed of the admins here being overly concerned with civility or respectability, and it just felt very avoidable.
Edit: And besides, my life is nothing if not a series of weird hills to die on. I think I've always had a problem with refusing to let things go, which can be both a strength and a weakness.
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I can't think of anything less trans-friendly than mandatory pronoun marking.
I quite liked this quote from Isabel Fall (more about identity than pronouns specifically, but still related!)
“We make boxes that seem to enclose a satisfying number of human experiences, and then we put labels on those and argue about them instead,” she says. “The boxes change over time, according to a process which is governed by, as far as I can tell, cycles of human suffering: We realize that forcing people into the last set of boxes was painful and wrong, we wring our hands, we fold up some new boxes and assure ourselves that this time we got it right, or at least right enough for now. Because we need the boxes to argue over. I do not want to be in a box. I want to sift through your fingers, to vanish, to be unseen.”
0I think mandatory pronoun marking is a bad thing in IRL spaces, but in online spaces it's probably less of a big deal, especially when neopronouns or even None is an acceptable answer.
1I essentially agree with the quote, but I can think of plenty of things that are less trans friendly than a digital pronoun circle. My point is that there is a very large trans population on Hexbear, and we can only assume that the trans population there are also universally the types of trans people who are open to sharing their pronouns publicly anyways — or else they would most likely just join a different instance without that requirement.
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I agree with defederation based solely on the fact that nothing can be argued without it developing into an utter shit-fest with them. They only have memes and a spectrum of weird to abhorrent takes politically to give.
What, overall would we be losing vs gaining the ability to use the rest of Lemmy in peace?
0This is exactly how I see it
Honestly I find them more toxic than the people over at Lemmygrad and that is by no means a support of those people either, they're both shit.
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