Fair, but a lot of new users might also get discouraged if the first thing they see is content from exploding-heads or hexbear, and the instances that strive to be safe, inclusive spaces and thus do a significant amount of defederating are usually quite forthright about this when you sign up. For example, I knew just what to expect when I joined beehaw.
The instance I’m posting from now tries to keep things inclusive more via moderation vs. defederation. There are pros and cons to each approach. I can see both perspective.
I just don’t think either approach harms the fediverse. I think that’s a bit melodramatic.
Funny enough, Hexbear actually defederated from my main instance first, due to it not being inclusive enough for their standards. My own experiences with Hexbear as an autistic enby are that Hexbear is actually the most inclusive Lemmy instance out there, by no small margin. The issue with Hexbear is that its users like to “punch up” at non-leftists, pointing out how people propagate or benefit from exploitative systems, and justify these systems to themselves.
Being “dunked on” may annoy and wound the pride of non-leftists, but this is also very much not the same as the actually evil Nazi shit posted to EH, which “punches down”. I have for many years understood the difference between being annoyed and having my pride wounded for having a bad opinion, and being actively terrorized and marginalized for being a member of a marginalized group. The world would be better off if more people understood that difference.
By no means am I saying it’s just as bad or remotely the same as a Nazi instance. I mean, I consider myself anarcho-communist, so it’s not like they’re too leftist for me or whatever, but it’s hard to call it an inclusive space while communicating in such a toxic, off-putting way. It leads me to question whether they’re even genuine communists when they don’t seem to be motivated by any sense of community.
Maybe I’m a bit quick to judge them, but they remind me of dirtbag leftists from CTH, who were so toxic that I’d actually encounter them freely using slurs in the threads. Not exactly punching up, eh?
So no, I’d take a million hexbears over one exploding-heads, but to be honest l don’t have any reason to associate with any of them. Maybe it’s my age, but it all seems so very childish and off-putting to me.
Hexbear at least has a no-tolerance policy for open slurs, as far as I’m aware. But you’re saying with regard to /r/CTH, that it wasn’t, like, people reclaiming slurs, or using “slurs” for non-marginalized groups – that it was actual, proper, undeniably hurtful slurring you saw? And by the way, what is a “dirtbag leftist”, anyway?
I can definitely understand being put off by the way that the Hexbears often talk. I have managed to have a lot of constructive conversations with the Hexbears, where they honestly just write normally and almost unfairly politely for my asininity; but when the Hexbears aren’t in Serious Mode, which is most of the time, then their comments just look like cryptic emojis and weird slang, right? And I think that’s appealing for a certain type of person, but not for others. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to be childish or flippant, so it doesn’t bother me.
Whether the Hexbear culture is toxic is a different question. I can feel comfortable asking silly questions there or expressing sides of my identity that I might hide in other spaces, but there are also parts of the Hexbear culture that I like less and wish would change. Foremost that they could use a reminder of Hanlon’s razor sometimes.
