Hexbear admins decide to shut down two communities. All hell breaks loose.
Yesterday, an unexpected admin post was made announcing that hexbear would be shutting down and recreating two of their most popular communities (a): the_dunk_tank and dredge_tank. For those who are not aware, those two are some of the most notorious comms in the threadiverse which routinely cause inter-lemmy drama (disclaimer, the deteriorating relations between our instance and hexbear and my own ban from hexbear was ultimately triggered by various posts in the_dunk_tank)
The stated reason was to promote more thoughtful discussions and to prevent a white cishet mindset which was apparently promoted by the content in those comms, according to the mods and admins.
Within a day 1.3 thousand comments were made with hexbear regulars upset at this decision and discussing within.
However, before this announcement, the top admin of hexbear posted in the cross-lemmy admin matrix chat urging other admins to close down their "drama communities" as well.
In the midst of this, people realize another old-mod had recently come back after a 3-year hiatus, and now people start suspecting some correlation. That mod makes a public post (a) before shortly after deleting their account.
There's also smaller pieces of chaos ongoing, such as one admin, banning one of their alts "as a bit" using wording that they were not aware is misgendering ("fella") which caused other hexbears to pile on. Eventually that was resolved, and admins are asked to tone down the "bit doing" during this heated period.
I already thought they had one of the most "redditesque" userbase of Lemmy. The mods and admins being on par for the course isn't surprising. Also, with the lack of trust in their users displayed here, it seems like they reject the monster they've created...
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase. I've had a much improved Lemmy experience since unsubscribing to most of it. Hexbear is its own thing, unknown in my experience and unique to itself.
Lemmy.world is by far the most redditesque userbase
And I won't be the one telling you otherwise. It's reddit 2, period.
I won't deny that Hexbear developed a culture while slow-cooking in their corner (nor would I say there's nothing interesting to read on their instance, very far from it). However, I've seen the same kind of behavior coming from them that turned me off reddit in the first place. It makes me avoid interactions with them...