My first months on Lemmy were spent on Lemmy.world, which was the biggest instance at the time. I had no experience with Hexbear because .world had defederated that instance. I sometimes saw it being described as a “tankie” instance, but it was nothing specific.
After I moved to .zip, I came across !games@hexbear.net, which seemed to be free from anything overtly political and reminded me of r/Gamingcirclejerk, so I subscribed to it and occasionally made comments related to gaming.
Today I made multiple comments to a post about an article on the STALKER game developers having removed the Soviet symbols and the Russian audio in the remastered edition of the game. I would argue that in the thread, there were no comments from me that could be construed by a reasonable person as defensive of Nazism, fascism, or even hinting at it. For example, in one of the comments, I linked a Ukrainian law that prohibits the use of Nazi symbols, though I highly advise looking through all my ten comments as to avoid any misunderstanding or false impressions.
Conversely, one comment posted by another user dismissed Holodomor as Nazi propaganda, which I reported, but a moderator of that community just ended up calling me out for that and taking no action, followed by them banning me.
The thread containing all of my untouched posts is still available via lemmy.zip. My comments are also available for viewing via my user page. They are not available on hexbear due to the ban.
What do you expect, it’s HexBear. They make ML look like neoliberals.
I align more closely with hexbear politics than almost all non-hexbear users. IMO, their politics is not the problem – they’re just an astoundingly toxic community.
That’s the honey trap.
They appear to be a progressive left wing community- very supportive of socialism, trans rights, big fat queer comm…then you interact and find out these are all just populist shoes they like to wear for kicking the shit out of people
Elaborate!
I don’t really know how to do that other than to dig through replies from hexbear users pointing out how much vitriol they use. But in general, there’s a lot of name-calling (e.g. since you disagree with me, you must be a “white cracker,” “minstrel,” etc. – wtf kind of problem these guys have with minstrels I don’t understand); a lot of posting of flippant reaction images instead of actual responses, and so on. They’re clearly very angry about politics, which I get, but also have no interest in actually debating politics with any level of subtlety; even when I agree with someone in broad strokes but disagree about a particular item because I think it’s counter-productive to their own cause, I just get harshly told off. As a result, I can only assume they imagine everyone else is disingenuous.
Ah yeah, even in that thread, there were people responding with images or immediately labeling me a liberal without explaining or knowing anything about my views except that I seemingly sided with Ukraine. One person was very angry and needlessly escalatory with their “go fuck yourself”. Another felt the need to comment on my post history and try to use me running an Epic Games community against me. There’s a lot of ad hominem and straw man type arguments, which is usually indicative of not having strong counterarguments on the main subject itself.
That’s every internet discussion. You skipped over the constructive arguments and effortposts, didn’t address any of their valid criticism, and focused solely on the shitposts. If you’re not engaging in constructive discussion, mods can remove you at their discretion.
Are you serious? If anything, I ignored the angry comment, the low effort image comments, and the one outright denying the mass killing of millions of Ukrainians (which was my reason for reporting it), but I engaged at length with the people who were making more or less proper arguments. I could have engaged with the top one about Ukrainians praising Bandera and remind the person that they should have a perfect understanding of how that works, given that tankies (which was that user’s self-description) too praise the adversaries of their countries despite Stalin and Putin’s track records making Bandera’s pale in comparison, but I thought that would be way too triggering, so I didn’t post that draft.
No, that’s not it. I am not denying that there is constructive and high-effort activity on the instance. But the moment-to-moment conversation is superlatively hostile, (at least when I show up lol), and I’m making pretty tame comments – it’s not because of me. I don’t anywhere near that amount of venom in other instances.
Start making leftist (i.e. anti transphobia, pro worker, pro environment etc) comments on .world or .shit and you’ll experience a lot more vitriol. At least that’s been my experience and the reason I stay away from these cesspools.
My experience with .world has generally been mild, though I have seen hexbear users criticize them often for being too conservative. I guess I don’t interact with .world much.
Yeah that’s basically my feelings too. I wonder why they are so defensive. (edit: /gen)
I agree, and both their problematic hot takes and their toxicity are well-represented in OP’s link.