chat

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.