You either block them and die a liberal or you engage and observe and live long enough to start spreading their agitprop and using your new pronoun “comrade” as you lead the way to glorious revolution.

(Seriously though, they’re just people on a leftist political instance. You’ll get the good, bad, and weird, same as any other place).

I just took a look at your participation in the hexbear thread you are referencing, and I’m confused about the issue. Seems like you got mostly thoughtful and positive replies. There was some .world bashing at the end including the bit you quoted. It seems strange to me that rather than ask questions about hexbear to the actual users there, you came over here to ask on an instance that has daily threads complaining about leftist instances.

Hexbear users will bully you to hell the very second you say something they disagree with. In my case, I said South Park is a funny show. They also think Putin is a good guy and at the same time they pretend 90% of their users are trans. Basically it’s a bunch of douche kids playing revolutionaries and intimating anyone they disagree with. My 2 cents.

Holy shit the sea of strawmen in this thread is insane.

Stick around for a while longer and you will find their assessments are not far off.

They seem like grad users in the fact that no one outside their instance wants to federate with their toxic instance. Who would’ve guessed that a highly charged instances calls people “Hitlerites” as an insult. (Obv I lack context here regarding the comment.)

It’s something every sane person should block as soon as they join Lemmy.

“A self help group for people who struggle with solvent abuse.”

Best answer in this thread.

Note: being on Lemmy for about a year, I didn’t live through the early days of this place. Here’s what I can recollect, as neutrally given as possible.

TL;DR The recent conflicts between two politically different groups on Lemmy have radicalized many people, and many Hexbear residents in particular. Unless you are to discuss the far-left ideas and are very radical about disadvantaged groups, you are safe to block it.

Hexbear is a far-left (as in actually communist) anti-discrimination community, initially more of a safe haven to promote equality and foster a healthy and welcoming place for leftists to come together.

With core developers of Lemmy also being far-left, Hexbear naturally fitted the landscape along with the official Lemmy.ml, heavy far-left Lemmygrad.ml and others.

As time went on, however, all sorts of left-leaning and apolitical folks, not just far-left, came to the platform, filling other instances like Lemmy.world (now the most populated of them all), sh.itjust.works and many others.

As a result, Lemmy has two groups of people with radically different political views: one is a group of more or less organized far-left, and the other is everyone else, most commonly liberals. This distinction has caused a lot of conflicts and heated discussions based on political adherence.

Most notable case is latest US elections. The far left side generally called not to vote Democrat as Biden has failed to deliver on many of his promises and empowered Israel to commit war crimes in Palestine, while the liberal audience called to vote Democrat to not let Republicans take the lead, which may arguably lead to an even worse outcome than unaccountable Dems can make.

This divide has raised a lot of mutual hostility, brigading, and uncivil behavior, which has radicalized many on both sides of the conflict, the consequences of which you have got to experience.

What to do with that is up to you to decide. Hexbear is very politically uniform and very political overall, so if you’re not here to discuss communism, you won’t lose much and will gain additional peace of mind.

Why don’t you asked them yourself? !askchapo@hexbear.net

Probably a bad idea to ask about a Marxist instance on a .world community, since .world is known to be quite biased against Marxism.

Tankies

It’s an instance meant to seem attractive to western youths while explicitly only serving the needs of the Chinese Dictatorship.

Most of their users are bots, human decency is their kryptonite. If ever you are convinced that any of them are your friends, you’re just another mark they intend to make full use of and throw away: you are not a human being in the eyes of Hexbear.

It’s an instance that became known for brigading other instances to “dunk” on anyone who has remotely different ideas than they do, as well as spamming oversized emojis and pictures of pigs shitting on their own testicles. They have been defederated by most instances for good reason, as they always showed up enmasse to completely derail discussion and their own stated purpose of federating with other instances was to “dunk on liberals and dismantle Western propaganda”. Their users would harass people in DMs for weeks on end if that person said something they didn’t like. I was there to see this happen in several instances before they all defederated from Hexbear and it almost made me quit Lemmy entirely.

Below are some examples of various instances considering federating with Hexbear, only for Hexbesr’s users to cause enough problems to get defederated. The threads themselves are best viewed from an instance that federates with Hexbear in order to see the awful behaviour for yourself, and the lemmy.ca thread has several more examples of this.

https://lemmy.ca/post/3326347 https://lemm.ee/post/4543536 https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2017079 https://lemmy.world/post/249833

Do note that a lot of Hexbear users have alternate accounts on lemmy.ml and midwest.social (because nobody wants to federate with Hexbear), and a lot of these people will be in this very thread trying to defend Hexbear. Don’t be fooled by them. Hexbear is a toxic cesspit.

https://sh.itjust.works/c/meanwhileongrad

One word, Tankies.

The community I shared rounds up posts that really portray their Phalusophy Philosophy really well. Now you would need to scroll down a bit to see some posts from hexbear specifically.

but I cannot recommend you enough to stay well away from hexbear, lemmygrad and if possible .ml

Seems this post is being brigaded by hexbear alts fyi

Hexbear is pretty overwhelmingly queer/trans and anarchist/communist.

If you’ve never run into a transfem communist IRL it’s probably because you’re not in many queer or left wing organizing spaces.

I’m actually pretty new to Lemmy in the last year and in that time I’ve seen way more .world posters being toxic about .ml/hexbear and making vague posts about how bad they are. I have to imagine that’s why you’re now seeing backlash to .world. Also most of the time I see people complaining about these instances and I dig into the modlog it’s overwhelmingly because they got banned at some point for being reactionary and are bent out of shape about it.