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What is your opinion on Lemmy.world and by extension instances that have hexbear defederated?

My first time experience here had been very politically charged and I asked about it in askLemmy and I was told to immediately block you people in the options I was given

I had the opportunity to browse around and found out that you folk were decent and weren't as awful as told in that post I made

How do you view .world and by extension other instances that defederate (and view negatively) towards you?

143 comments

  • I feel like the rest of the fediverse thinks about us a lot more than we think about them. We were here for years before most of the big Reddit-clone instances started up, and had already developed a significant site culture and norms. Many of us were ambivalent about federation in the first place, and .world and others defederating from us as a "preemptive last resort" was pretty much just funny. The hysterical propaganda about how insane and abusive we are is also funny; this is one of the friendliest and most supportive places on the internet as long as you're not a fascist. We're happy over here doing our thing away from all the Redditors.

  • Lemmy World defederated from Hexbear for political reasons. They didn't like explicitly socialist content. They are incapable of accepting its existence. They did this in tandem with banning leftists that were vocal and active on their platform at the time.

    This is extremely obvious because at the time this occurred the reasong they claimed for the defederation was because that Hexbear does hate speech. This is blatantly bullshit to anyone that spends even the slightest amount of time here, Hexbear is probably the LEAST tolerant of reactionary behaviour and views of every lemmy that exists.

    That however does not agree with the turbo neoliberals who run lemmyworld, who can not tolerate any views to the left of their own.

    How do you view .world

    Dot world has trended rightwards ever since the defederation of Hexbear and banning of leftists on it. They will continue to trend rightwards. If you remove left wing voices from your space the result is a right wing space that increasingly alienates everyone as it becomes more and more reactionary, with more and more people leaving because they can not tolerate how obnoxious the right is, and leadership increasingly will pander to the right when left with the choice of doing so or dying as a site as those are the only users they will still have.

    I personally wanted to remain federated with lemmyworld in order to continue to engage liberals, educate them, and pull those that I could leftwards. The truth is that lemmyworld defederated because they knew I and others would have been successful in doing that. The majority of Hexbear would probably oppose federation now.

  • I view .world fairly negatively, but I'm a bit conflicted about it.

    The overall ethos is the type of milquetoast liberal (as in capitalist) tech bro that I associated with some of the more annoying and smug parts of Reddit. The politics comm has all the familiar trappings of /r/politics and there is a fair amount of "red scare" type posting, especially if China is involved. The smear campaigns against the .ml and hexbear instances also get under my skin.

    It's the instance I would first suspect of becoming a "Nazi bar" in the long run because of their prominence and typical faux "tolerance" (though sh.it.just.works might be worse). Some here would probably argue it already is one. Same as what happened to Reddit over time. Subs like KiA, the Donald, and the general conservative sub just wouldn't have been as big in early Reddit, even as Libertarian as it was.

    It also is arguably hostile to Lemmy as a platform. If you subscribe to their Fediverse comm, then you'll see a post at least once a month that exists to harshly criticize the Lemmy developers and the platform as a whole while providing space for every reactionary developer to advertise their competing platform. I find that harmful to Lemmy, which is the most successful Reddit clone to be created by far.

    However, it's a big instance, and as much as I like my platforms being full of leftists, I don't mind interacting with more uh everyday people. There are a lot of comms that probably would never exist here. Plus they just bring a lot of activity to the platform as a whole and they aren't all bad.

    Pretty much why I made my .ml account my default. I can interact with hexbear, .ml, lemmygrad, .world and the others. Sometimes that's for the worst, but it's mostly been a good experience.

    But yeah I'd take hexbear every day over .world if I had to choose. Even with the terminally online struggle sessions.

  • whenever i'm on my lemmy.ml account and i see something horrifyingly hateful and/or condescending, it's a .world user like 90% of the time

    it's gotten to a point where i don't even like to go outside of hexbear anymore because it's just upsetting to see all this reddit-tier shittiness on a platform that used to be so pleasant in its early days. wish it had grown organically instead of having that exodus of reddit's dregs honestly, but at least most of them seem to have congregated on one particular (blockable) instance

  • The other big instances that were only created as a response to the reddit "exodus" are kind of a joke to us, as we existed for 3 years in our own community before they were even conceived - yet somehow we are consistently derided as the "invaders", "brigaders" or generally othered explicitly due to the range of political opinions expressed here and a site culture of having no respect for civility, decorum or norms when discussing political matters.

    .worlders will continuously deny that reasons for their group hatred of hexbear are political, but as a number of posters have pointed out and supplied the link to, .world defederated with hexbear as a "pre-emptive last resort". Therefore, no .worlder has ever been able to see our posts or comments whatsoever, unless they were also registered to another instance. Their announcement post outlining the "pre-emptive last resort" also explicitly outlines the reasoning as political.

    On the civility aspect, realistically at the core of it this is also political - I think many here agree that the bounds of "civil discussion" are specifically drawn to entrench the status quo, and also note that an easy tactic to silence dissent is to attack the manner in which words are said when you cannot logically attack or disagree with the substance of the argument (I swear i'm not trying to act like a debate pervert, but I do sound like a dweeb here). This inherently grows from a contradiction though: Why is it civil to be able to debate the validity and existence of marginalised peoples, or justify genocide, or argue for the upkeep of the current hegemony? And why is it not civil to tell those who justify genocide, argue that the current hegemony is inherently superior, or believe that people's existence should be erased to eat shit? This is where many other instances (mostly those established in 2023 and not 2020) refuse to apply thought, leading to a dedicated handful posting everywhere possible that hexbear is "aggressive" or "abusive".

    All in all, we have our little corner of the internet and we like it. We dabbled in federation, given Dessalines' vision for lemmy as a platform, and had our ups and downs. But overall, given the process of the "pre-emptive last resort" and the related threads at the time, we probably don't think about lemmy.world often, other than when we bring it up as a joke to laugh at. It's a place where redditors ran to continue to be redditors on lemmy software instead of reddit and feel good about themselves for it. It is administered and moderated like the former "default" subreddits are, with all of the white cishet american male hang-ups that this entails. Many therefore think it is a deeply unserious place, and subsequently pay it the amount of mind it deserves.

  • I'm gonna be honest, I don't browse any of the Lemmy instances defedded from Hexbear, so the only time I hear (and think) about them is when there's some drama sufficiently inane that it's spread over here (.world's recent policy changes, cis Lemmy users throwing a fit over neopronouns on the other trans instance .blahaj.zone).

    This has probably given me a bit of a skewed view of, like, the more bigoted and intellectually incurious side to the instances. There are no doubt very nice people over there, but no one ever gossips about how nice another person is, so all I hear about is the creeps.

    That said, I do think they have a really strange view of Hexbear over there that's partly the result of the all the arguments that broke out when Hexbear first moved over to the mainline Lemmy fork and began federating, but also partly because how Hexbear's been hyped up as some sort of evil, communist gestalt over there.

    Take this comment from one of the threads in your recent post for example:

    Hexbear was never federated with .world, from what I've seen browsing through the commenters account they've never made an account on any instance other than .world. This isn't the first time I've seen someone say something like this, whenever this inter-instance drama comes up again, you get comments like this from instances that never federated. It's like people have fixated on an idealised version of us to the point at which they have some sort of collective false memories of a much more aggressive Hexbear than the one that really exists.

  • For your question: I don’t think about them at all.

    The rest is just my general feelings on federation and hexbear that you are free to ignore.

    I was against federation to begin with. I was even against lemmygrad (still am, much as they are comrades). I browse by local even now.

    Hexbear is hexbear. It grew out of r/cth (I voted for the name being chapo.chat and was against it being changed to hexbear). It has its own culture. It’s own social norms. It doesn’t need to be a part of anything bigger. Note: this doesn’t mean it’s users don’t have flaws and that there haven’t been things in its culture that have needed to be changed in the past and in the present.

    IMO, there was a time when federation could’ve worked, maybe right after it was created when it was young and still finding its identity. I understand the idea of finding new users especially as the number has dwindled from the peak (which itself was a shadow of cth in the first place).

    But attaching itself to lemmy, lib-central, was always a failed endeavour. A better option would’ve been trying to become a leftist hub for Reddit communities in the wake of the cth’s closure and that was tried but it failed due to numerous factors (some were, honestly, this community being too toxic to such things which is what has partially led to the decline in numbers in the first place).

    But all that’s the past. We’re a part of Lemmy now for what it’s worth (and not even, as some tried to claim in the beginning, as the big bad posters - I remember that what some here tried to say we would be due to our memberships!). They can all defederate from us and I couldn’t care less. They are all useless libs.

    Some positive things to end this on. The reason I was on cth and came to chapo.chat and have stayed on hexbear. This is the most trans positive place I have ever seen (cth wasn’t but I wasn’t trans then either lmao). But now? I dare you to find a safer space on the entire internet.

    This is the only space where I can talk to other leftists from around the world to both shitpost and get educated. I learn new things everyday. I also take the memes with a grain of salt. We don’t worship at the altar of Assad. But it feels good to at least be among others who can see the fucking hypocrisy of supposed progressives who care about human rights criticizing Assad and then telling to us to vote for democrats. Go fuck yourself.

    Like, this space was created because cth got banned for praising John Brown. Don’t forget that.

    This place even now, despite being 99.99% Leninist professes by and maintains ideological neutrality. It is extremely rare to see a leftist space that doesn’t bash either anarchists or MLs (and isn’t instead just social democrats). You wouldn’t know this if you haven’t been here a while I guess, because most people here are MLs but you can be an anarchist here. You can also, btw, criticize china or dprk or Cuba etc. I’ve done so. Just don’t be a lib about it.

    So, hexbear to me has become an extremely rare instance of a platform which is not only queer-friendly but also genuinely leftist and accepting of all leftists. It isn’t perfect. I think around a month or so ago (maybe more, maybe less) there was a big issue surrounding misogyny. I think admins/mods worked to resolve that but someone else might know more.

    This became much longer than I intended it to be. TLDR: hexbear is a comfortable safe space. I know the people. I know the posts and comments. I know what to expect. Every other social media platform (except TikTok but it too throws the odd curveball) fills me with anger and I have to mentally prepare myself for battle because I know there will be useless libs spouting their regular bullshit. None of that here.

  • I don't really think much of them. I'm just here because hexbear is probably one of the only places on the internet that accepts my ramblings on ballistic missiles, geopolitics and working towards a polycentric/multipolar world. I don't use the rest of the site outside of the news megathread much. I'd probably be banned on an instance like Lemmy world because of being "anti west/anti NATO" or something like that, even though I try to make sure my analysis is unbiased. Lots of people on hexbear probably think I'm a "doomer" of sorts because my analysis is not as optimistic as theirs. But they engage constructively with what I post, which is the difference when compared to other instances which would likely ban me for the reasons I listed earlier.

  • The way they talk you'd think Internet comments cause them physical suffering. They act like disagreement and emoji spam is tantamount to slapping someone in the face. They're so genuinely bizarre about norms and manners.

    I don't really get it. Really thin skinned and weasely.

  • They preemptively defed from hexbear. It is pretty funny how much

    hexbear is for them despite never having directly interacted.

  • I've come to refer to instances that federate with Hexbear and Lemmygrad as "East Lemmy" and other instances as "West Lemmy", and I do have an account I use to lurk "West Lemmy". There's a handful of good communities on .world: I mainly look at communities for things like anime fanart, but sometimes there's other things there that are worthwhile, too, like news or discussions about topics I care about. It is an unfortunate fact that most people on the English-speaking Internet are not communists, and so a lot of people will end up on instances that don't federate with Hexbear basically because they just don't know any better. And even if those people will oftentimes post a whole lotta cringe, and the administrators of these websites especially tend to be complete jackasses — there's also going to be things that people will post on defederated instances which you'd otherwise miss out on.

    So as a whole I'd say that the administration of other instances should be changed, and people who use Lemmy expecting it to just be a new Reddit should either change their expectations or leave, but I accept that as long as these things just aren't going to happen, that it's worthwhile to have accounts on "both sides of the curtain".

    • There's a fair few instances that are federated with both. I admin one. It's a great option for those of us who came over looking for a reddit replacement and don't want to miss some of the rarer decent content on "West Lemmy" nor the 99% amazing posts on East :)

      It seems like I have more comments in HB than off it though sometimes. Y'all are just better.

      (and elite emoji game)

  • Sometimes someone here posts a link to people on lemmy.world freaking out about the existence of hexbear and I go over there to laugh for a bit.

    Then I stop thinking about them, come back here, and read dumb jokes about stinky beans.

  • I don't really think about other instances at all, but I do like that there's some kind of inflow from outside Hexbear. I don't want the community to be totally insular, and while obviously I don't believe people should be allowed to come into this space and spread disinformation or just generally be jerks, I do believe it's important to not give up on every random person who might be shown that burning down the planet for the benefit of a handful of the most wealthy and horrible people to be alive isn't actually the best possible way for human society to function, and that there's an alternative.

  • .world is like the "reddit default subs" of lemmy. The #1 suggestion for new reddit users had always been to unsubscribe from the defaults in order to improve their experience, so being defederated from world isn't much of a loss.

    A part of me kind of wishes we were still federated with some of the radlib instances so we could have more active reading groups and movie nights.

  • If you're not local or from the grad and post on hexbear your posts will be treated with higher levels of suspicion and scrutiny. I don't come here to talk to libs, they can kick rocks.

    • I've committed a few .mls screen names to memory (s/o aradina), and those who have pronouns in screenname are often chill but yup after a recent run in with a troll it reinforced that chuddery is the default on most other instances

  • There are certain toxic behaviors that aren't unique to them but are very common on the internet, so much so that it's easy to take them for granted. The behaviors I'm talking about, which often go hand in hand, are 1. Crybullying, and 2. Making shit up. What makes Hexbear good is that we do not tolerate either of those. What makes .world awful is that those behaviors are extremely common and widespread.

    It's very common for a user on .world to get banned from some community for doing something shitty and then lie about why they got banned and go make a post whining about it, and the culture there lets them get away with it, nobody asks them for the receipts or goes looking for them and they instead give them sympathy and the benefit of the doubt, which bad actors take advantage of to spread drama. I have an .ml alt where my profile reads, "If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they are lying," and I have lost count of the number of times I have posted those words and been 100% correct.

    That shit does not fly here. That's not to say we don't have drama sometimes, but if you try to pull that shit, we won't just dismiss it until you can show us the evidence of what really happened, we will dig up the evidence ourselves and if it turns out you're full of shit and just trying to stir the pot, we will mock and bully you for our own amusement before bringing down the banhammer, and we don't give a fuck if that makes us look like the bad guys or if you run off to another community to whine about us.

    That might sound harsh, and admittedly there are times when that gets misdirected, but there's plenty of people who come here after hearing all kinds of terrible things about us and don't encounter any of it and wonder what all the fuss is about - because they simply don't do the whole crybully routine. This is a tradition going all the way back to the r/chapotraphouse days, when so many of us found our way to the community by way of hearing all the worst people on Reddit talking about how terrible it was.

    That sort of thing is the biggest culture shock I experience when I'm on my alt, the way people will just casually lie, just constantly, to the point that you start to second-guess if they're even conscious of it or if they're just so used to running everything they say through a filter that makes them look better or more like a victim that they aren't even conscious of what they're doing - and the way people just let them do it, never fact-checking, giving them the benefit of the doubt, coming to their defense when they're called out. It's a very different environment that's way more succeptable to bad actors playing the social media game.

    • This is an extremely insightful breakdown of a big aspect of the posting here, eating shit, running back to other instances to spread the fear/hatred of Hexbear dynamic we see a lot here.

  • Every once in a while, I would use a lemmyml alt to browse /c/linux, and lemmyworld is truly the dreg of the fediverse. Completely worthless that offer nothing of value. And this isn't even getting to their reactionary politics.

  • One of the first posts I saw after I signed up here was "It's so much nicer since I blocked lemmy.world" and I read through the posts on that instance. It looked like it was just normal people (ew), but with an absolute firehose of activity. I blocked it for a while, myself, and found that it was extremely quiet.

    Then I unblocked it. Every time I found someone being stubbornly opinionated, it was a .world user. That's just people, and when you get enough of them in one place, you get more of the 'average' person.

    I used to connect through hexbear, and it felt like lemmy was dead. Then I checked out .world and none of my favorite people were there. I gave up on lemmy because of that disconnect. Being on THIS instance, however, I get to see ALL the assholes! Even the ones I don't like. I just prune that tree to my own personal preference as I go along, blocking communities and users on a case-by-case.

    The trick to enjoying a site like this is to know when to simply NOT respond to people trying to troll you. You can even block them if you want, so it won't happen again. Personally, I enjoy thinking critically about the opinions of those who disagree with me, and if they make a good point, I will concede it. But I don't appreciate low-effort "nuh uh" style responses or people who are only mad because of a failure in reading comprehension.

  • I don't think about them at all to be honest. HB is my home and apart from the occasional clueless liberal or genuine wrecker/troll who wanders by, I'm content to hang out with my trans, leftist comrades and just post about beans.

  • I don't really care about the rest of the lemmyverse, what i've seen of it seemed full of redditors and that's not something anybody should waste their time with.

143 comments