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.
Hexbears caught wind of this and quickly accused the admin of duplicity, and having other motives instead of their stated ones. The admin in question as defense admitted that it was their attempt to manipulate other lemmy instance admins and it backfired on them
After a whole day of this, the main admin decided to step away from hexbear (a) , followed by more resignations (a)
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.
This "struggle session" is still ongoing, with people are asking the resigned mod to come back , and other admins unbanning accounts which were getting banned left and right(a) but it seems those popular comms still remain shut down.
They did exactly the same thing with Lemmy.nz, threw a shit fit and defederated, after a certain someone made a post suggesting we defederate them.
It was a very "you can't fire me, I quit" thing.
As in .ee defed them? I like .ee purly because we dont defed most instances even if they are toxic.
Same. I’m an adult. I can choose what I want to see on my phone while I poop.
Sometimes i look at what they say while i poop so i can compare them on an equal playing field
Smart.
Their votes will still influence your feed though. In that way, you don't get to choose entirely freely what you want to see, they will influence what you see as well.
You are lying. Hexbear disabled downvotes. They can't downvote anything.
Please don't accuse me of lying. Upvotes obviously influence the feed. I am aware that hexbear has disabled downvotes.
If you were on reddit at the time when /r/the_donald was a menace, you should know how harmful even upvotes can be.
I am sorry, you actually make sense.
It's okay, apology accepted.
Luckily upvoting doesn't change the ranking of posts
You dropped this: /s
username checks out
Well put. And I agree!