Basically the powers that be determined that Hexbear “violated” Lemmy’s TOS by being a little too right wing (their opinion) and therefore chose on behalf of the entirety of Lemmy that the instance should be defederated.
it does basically boil down to what other people have said but I’ll elaborate.
The reasons are political disagreements from the admins of lemmy.world, and them taking the site’s zealous left-wing opinions and shitposting culture as prima-facie evidence that hexbear users cannot be trusted not to break lemmy.world rules (unstated which rules) by pushing “their beliefs and ideology”. It almost sounds reasonable until you think about it like, at all. It’s an explicitly political instance (though honestly >50% of the posting is just news of the day and banter), so of course the users will by and large have those political opinions and post them. As long as they do so within the rules of lemmy.world I don’t see the issue personally.
I can sort of understand why tbf. Just playing the devil’s advocate here but the issue is that today it’s fine and shitposts are shitposts but Poe’s law will come into action at some point.
That’s not the actual reason. Hexbear was openly advocating for their “army” to brigade other instances once it was federating. It just so happens that the basis of that brigading was going to be political.
Lemmy.world pre-emptivly decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of having to deal with that.
Oh I’m not saying the overall opinions there are ironic and will stay that way, they are very much communists (and a notable minority of anarchists), and that isn’t likely to change, just that there’s also a lot of shitposting, and the general jokey tone seems to be what convinced admins not to take the “hey guys you have to follow the rules of federated instances when you post there” seriously
TBH reading “their” opinion on Russia and the Russia war I can see why people would just simply want them to stay within their weird island. Well defederation is still not a cool option in general for the platform as a whole but I can see how admins of instances read stuff like that and can’t help but let their own opinion influence their decision. I would probably stay away from these as well.
