Here's your weekly PCM on the latest Lemmyverse drama
Context
As you probably now, Hexbear is a fairly large leftist instance, whose users are notorious for being very loud in the communities of every instance they federate with. For a long time they blocked all instances, preferring to remain isolated. Recently, however, they have started allowing some large instances into their allow list.
Yesterday they expanded said list by including the popular sh.itjust.works (SJW) instance.
Some Hexbear users immediately jumped on the train by creating posts in !main@sh.itjust.works making sure everyone was aware of their presence and calling out what they thought was bigotry on SJW's side:
I don't think the problem with Hexbear is political. Some of their points are questionable, but that's of course up for debate.
What tends to annoy me about their users is how obnoxious they can be. Between the flooding of comments and replies, the weird emojis and the numerous attempts at provocating people from outside of their little cicle (which happens both in their domestic communities as well as the federated ones), it all makes you wonder if they even care about the health of the fediverse
I can deal with it by blocking communities and instances. But it's not worth it to most people. I'll never recommend the fediverse to anyone in it's current extremist state.
The good thing about the fediverse is that anyone can start their own instance and defederate from instances that are known to have problems with troublemakers and won't do anything about it.
It's infinitely better that Lemmy is going left rather then right because if it went right, the media would pick it up and then start casting FUD on the entire platform as being a cesspit of white supremacist groupthink and radicalization.
I imagine the Lemmy developers probably run join-lemmy.org and could start removing sites from there, but currently a lot of the general instances are listed there and they seem pretty sane. The only thing I find concerning is when someone claims that Joe Rogan is equivalent to Qanon.
I've seen people say another Lemmy user will "get the wall" two unrelated times. I've had comments correcting disinformation deleted with no explanation on lemmy.ml
On another account Lemmygrad users followed me around and downvoted every post I made. I ended up with -3,000 karma on that account.
Hexbear kinda just seem like trolls? Like no normal person seriously thinks making fun of a single dictator is equivalent to racism, it reads more like they're genocide apologists who don't want China's government questioned.
This tracks with what I found when looking into defederation. Calling them leftists is kinda falling for their deception.
They are authoritarians and use the cloak of leftism to defend authoritarian governments. They do not argue honestly and they brigade, coordinating on hexbear in plain sight. I defederated my two instances a while back for these reasons.
If they're going to do nothing but troll and be toxic, then unfortunately it's necessary. I also feel strongly that excessively defederating or banning visitors from the entire instance harms the fediverse. Instance bans and defederation should be used when instances have shown that they can't be relied on to communicate meaningfully outside their instance.
Many of them strike me as CCP propaganda peddlers. These types should be banned. If there are others that legitimately have opinions, I'd say leave them and let them be corrected by the larger community.
That said... If they abuse accounts and voting to pump their opinions (it feels like this may be happening), then ban them.
Tl;dr: Ban all shilling, astroturfing, and organized propaganda peddling.
I take it that beehaw's walled garden policy is working as intended, if you users aren't even aware of the tornados of shit going on out there lol. Good for you.
Personally I am kinda enjoying the chaos, but some threads over on sh.itjust.works are pretty wild with the Hex invasion.
Same. I've seen very little from them, but a lot of complaints about it. I've seen a bit of a tussle in the comment sections on posts that explicitly call them out. Usually it's just one of them though. Honestly, it feels like very few individuals are causing an issue and blocking the users is probably more fediverse friendly, but I still leave it up to the instance admins. Instances can defederate with them if they have a problem. They'll still see other stuff but those instances won't see them or their comments.
It's pretty rare from my experience to just see one of them in a post. They seem to always post together as a group and spamming pictures to the point it's hard to read the thread. You're either lucky, always active at times these people are not, or your instance has already defederated from them.
Long answer: there's no flair system in the Threadiverse (Lemmy + Kbin). We are working on building one limited to our instance but that takes time. Even then, once it will be finished it will only cover our instance. Users from other instances or platforms (such as yourself) will need extensions and 3rd party tools to get access to them. I plan on building those as well, but it will be only after the flairs are fully functional for our local users who of course are our primary concern.
Honestly, it's quite enjoyable to watch from the sidelines. The only thing that annoys me is you can hide that you're posting from an instance by editing your name (just like OP has done), and it seems every hexbear does it.
LMAO "hide" is a pretty strong word. You know you can still figure it out just by hovering over their name, right? Or clicking on their profile, clicking the fediverse icon... plenty of ways to find out, it's just slightly less obvious.
There's no bad faith behind it. I do that just because I like it better, looks cleaner to me.
It's still hiding it, just like when a corporation changes their name, or is bought out by another but doesn't change their name. Yes, you can figure it out by going to a website somewhere, or reading a newspaper from a decade ago... plenty of ways to find out, it's just slightly less obvious.
these fucken losers daydream about being relevant even in the most pathetic ways, lmao what utter muppets, noone gives a shit, just block their shitty instances.
These posts were made by brand new accounts, and those accounts weren't even hosted in Hex Bear.
They're also extremely obviously inflammatory.
Do I need to put two and two together for you here? They weren't brigading by Hexbear users, they were people trying to make it look like Hexbear would "immediately become annoying". This has happened in the past, not only with Hexbear, and not only on Lemmy.
Of the two posts I mentioned one account is indeed very new and not from Hexbear, the other one is 3 years old and IS from Hexbear.
There might be some external actors trying to stir the water, indeed that tends to happen pretty often all over the internet, but some Hexbear users are definitely involved.
What are you on about? The disingenous "this is racism" thread OP linked was posted and entirely populated by hexbear users registered at hexbear.
Also please don't pretend this is the only time hexbear users has done this, when that is in fact something they have done systematically since they federated (and even longer, because they did the same back on reddit when they were CTH).
Probably true to some extent, the problem to me is that if they are an anti-fascist instance, why can't they clean up their own trolls? If some dudes act the way magas imagine communists to be, how can't they self-police a bit? It shows that it must be incredibly easy to infiltrate antifa to make it look bad (probably happens too, lol).