Fun fact : it’s my first ever post on any lemmy instance/community blob-no-thoughts …which is messed up…

Okay tbh I don’t know if I should have posted this some place else or if here is just fine oh-shit

So I’m brand new here, I’ve joined as lemm.ee was going to shut down. I only chose Hexbear because of how big and active it is, and of course for all its shade of leftism (being far left myself) but tbh that part was just a plus for me, what I wanted more was an opened enough instance, an inclusive one with enough peace of mind (not having to deal with unhinged/oppressing posts/comments daily).

But I started noticing that actually Hexbear had been defederated from some big instances like lemmy.world, upon trying to understand why I stumbled upon lemmy.world BS post explaining they did it for preemptive reasons (wtf 💀), obviously I just dismissed lemmy.world entirely and continued enjoying my time here. But then I noticed other instances like Blahaj blocked Hexbear as well and a bunch of others, I never found out why.

Then, while trying to understand what’s with all the defederating I stumbled upon a lot of negative noise against Hexbear, claiming you lot are doing some horrid stuff like war crimes denial, trolling, hate speech, spreading pro-Russian propaganda (like anti Ukrainian stuff don’t misinterpret me here, I’m fine with anti-western views or western propaganda skepticism), so much so I don’t really know if what I read was some kind of fascists trying to slander this place, or people confused about Hexbear political views, or if it’s linked to some Hexbear history I’m not aware of… It’s just weird because so far I haven’t encountered anything I could hold against this instance, for all I’ve seen you’re all sweet and making nice content, haven’t seen anything unhinged, but what makes me uneasy is this defederating thing, I can’t help but wonder why.

I’m really confused. Can someone explain to me what this is all about ? Is it just some right wing noise, some unknown drama or what ?

Edit (in case any of you see it): Thanks a lot everyone for all your answers, kind words, jokes, emojis and for being so welcoming. What you all said was very informative, and most of it I sadly expected. Having taken a liking to lemmy I knew that whatever I’d learn it’d be a cause for concern, it saddens me that several instances, big ones at that, would just make more room for the far right by suppressing leftists and spreading hate. As always in any such case I can’t say I’m surprised but it worries and disgust me nonetheless. Anyway I’m glad I found this place :)

  • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    124·
    1 天前

    Hexbear existed pre-federation as its own little isolated forum that developed a relatively-active userbase with relatively shared ideals. When federation came around, Hexbear was different enough that we couldn’t enable it right away and it took much effort from the dev team here to “unfork” us. When federation was finally enabled, our culture clashed with other instances in several major ways:

    1. emojis were bugged and were enormous when viewed on any other instance
    2. our high activity and commonality of opinion made other instances think we were constantly botting or “brigading” (its legacy has been preserved in emoji form: brigading ), when in reality it was simply our users posting as they always have
    3. we have a whitelist of instances, and the mod team demands compliance with certain standards. Of particular note due to the current internet culture, for an instance to remain federated with us, they must not be willing to tolerate transphobia by their own userbase. This is a bar that most instances fail to pass.
    4. we really hate Biden, Harris, and the democrats more broadly for various valid reasons (currently the hot button topic is them carrying out a genocide in occupied Palestine), and libs really hate to hear how the “good guys” are themselves monsters, or seeing “Death to America” regularly.