What had me block the instance was how the majority of Hexbear posts and users I was encountering initially was how annoyingly spammy they were. Acting like Lemmy was Twitch chat, spamming giant ugly reaction stickers everywhere, literally behaving like 12 year olds.
Then I also started to notice the far-right authoritarian simping buried under all that chaos.
My understanding of the stickers is that on their instance they aren't massive. So it's some disconnect between their UI and others. But I might be misremembering.
If I see a comment with 12 replies, all from the same instance, all just the same emoji over and over, I don't care that it's small, that's spam to me. They have their culture, so let them have fun. But I'm not part of it, so leave me out, it's annoying. I think both of these are fair takes.
Yeah, as the other comment says, my understanding is the stickers are the size of an emoji on their instance. Something about either federation or the client on their server messes it up. Maybe some clients have fixed it, but mine (Sync) has not. Maybe it's unfixable if you aren't from their instance.