~500 comments about our instance and admins in the past week. Talk about needing to touch some grass…
What do you expect? There’s a reason everyone who has a desire to maintain their sanity has defederated from them.
There’s some good peeps there and they help in keeping the crypto-fash in check. But their clannishness is unchecked.
they help in keeping the crypto-fash in check
Unless your users at large are crypto fascists I don’t think you need crypto authoritarians to keep crypto fascists in check.
Well their criticism of the current system is on-point, and they can help counter pro-capitalism ideologues. It’s just that their praxis tends to be shite when they try to be all “vanguard of the proletariat” or overuse their “bullying” as a tactic.
Do we really need their help keeping fascists in check? Problem is hexbears consider everyone who’s not on ml or hexbear to be an ipso facto fascist, and act accordingly. There’s zero room in their ideology for anyone with more moderate political views. I’d say the majority of our users are probably left leaning, but unless they happen to want the violent destruction of the western liberal democracies, then they just aren’t left enough for hexbears to accept.
Having said all that, I feel like we’ve managed to successfully remove most of the overt political trolling from hexbear on our instance lately, so our own communities aren’t too affected. But they really hate the fact we’ve been clamping down on them.
I’ll also acknowledge the majority of hexbear’s users don’t go trolling. They seem to have a bunch of well meaning people who are focussed on community building, a bunch of political history/theory enthusiasts, and a bunch of awful trolls who are just there for the lulz. You can see in their own modlogs that there’s tensions within their instance between those groups.
So, it’s a complicated situation to deal with, and depending which groups you interact with, you might have a very different experience. From my own experience I’d say the bad far outweighs the good though.
I think it’s because you and me face the brunt of their ire for trying to defend our instance inside their toxic comms, and that colors our perspective. But I try to step out of this and see things less personally when it affects more than just me. Just my take. I generally appreciate having the chance to be challenged from the left on occasion. None of us is perfect at the end of the day.
but unless they happen to want the violent destruction of the western liberal democracies
Btw, I think we also need to be cognizant when they exaggerate, but then again, a lot of their users will be the first to say “Lol, they think we exaggerate” so it’s not always clear since they’re too many levels deep in irony, which has it’s own impact on their userbase’s mentality. Similar statements generally require discussion and deconstruction before one can decide if that person deserves some sort of sanction.
Hey db0 and mods!
Since you’re just humans and we never know if the insults are slowly getting to you or you’re just having doubts, I want to give a voice to the lurkers in here and reiterate one thing: I feel exceptionally well taken care of in this instance! I’m extremely happy to be a part of it, I don’t even know what a downtime is and I don’t see much drama or toxicity if any at all. I’m simply loving Lemmy (yes, seriously!), I’m loving my time on it and I can just focus on following the communities I’m passionate in, which is the main point of Lemmy. I’m also aware that this does not happen without considerable hard work from the people behind it. So while I’m sure most of it goes unnoticed, I hope to at least convey with this that it’s not taken for granted or unappreciated in the slightest bit. A very big thanks to you all (and I try to donate where I can) <3
As for my personal experience, whenever a hexbear post makes it into my feed it’s mostly an overly aggressive political take or straight up trolling. It reminds me of the League of Legends kind of humour: It’s supposed to be a joke, but it’s not explicitly spelled out that it’s a joke and it attacks the individual. It’s a mix of aggressive trolling and just straight up toxicity. You just never know if you’re supposed to take it serious or not. But I personally like to have a choice if I eventually want to block them or not, and I feel like having a choice is one of the common threads between FOSS, Linux, the fediverse, self-hosting, piracy and so on.
But, while I do appreciate this, it isn’t crucial to my experience on Lemmy. So, if at any time this balance is taking too much of a toll on you guys, it wouldn’t be a big deal for me if we would “lose contact” with hexbear. Last thing I want is to slowly cook your sanity bit by bit, with each passing day a bit more, over something that is frankly not that important. I’d rather prefer you focus on what you love doing, be that doing technical stuff, improving the instance, memeing around, learning new stuff or simply discussing things with other people in peace. Life is much too short to argue with people, and over the internet it’s even worse!
Feels really good to read that. Thank you!
I don’t think they cook our sanity bit by bit. We all are pretty resilient and take a good chuckle whenever something like this happens.
even if these posts were “grilling the admins” it’s literally your instance, you don’t have to listen to anybody lol.
this instance is by far one of my favored instances though. So i’ll continue to use it regardless, and if it does go to shit, i’ll just jump ship lol. Freedom to surf is part of federation after all.
Oh so I’m not the only one. The users on Hexbear are always angry for some reason.
Not from what I’ve seen, it’s just not tolerant
of liberalism.
There, I fixed it for you.
I believed that, myself, for quite some time. I ended up blocking them, however, despite being an anarcho-syndicalist. The instance has very much cultivated a toxic and anti-social culture where the most active users are climbing over eachother for a chance to “dunk” on someone.
Just like right-wingers abuse outrage to get a rush some of the polygonimals clearly have become addicted to aggressive behaviors, with the rush from bullying and dunking being rather apparently more important than leftism. It’s a problem.
Additionally, their claims of anti-sectarianism and dialectics do not hold water when they are quick to label dissenting leftists as libs so that they can justify bans for those who don’t toe the line.
Hey I remember when I got temp sitebanned from db0 for getting too spicy about trans rights in some transphobic .world or shitjustworks thread, as much as I don’t like tankies they seem to be correct about this instance also having shit politics in some ways. Yet I’m still here because I’d like to think broadly as leftists we all agree on more things than we disagree on.
How about instead we all chill on the infighting and all touch some grass and stay out of each other’s way?
I don’t know who you mean by ‘they’ here (Hexbears? Db0? Mods?), but don’t give it to them. Ez.
Edit: FYI the guy below who got banned and his comment removed was saying the admin of db0 wanted attention btw. My roflcopter goes soi soi soi.
Drama like this is exactly why I laugh when people say its better on lemmy than reddit, its just a different flavor of the same shit when you’re on All.
Yes well turns out it is an innate part of those kind of forums. The more specialised the topic the less drama generally. There is very few places with no drama whatsoever on the web.
Sorry actually it’s quite old post I should stop commenting on old comments truly