Hexbear reminds me of the old internet. People being their authentic selves. Doesn't mean there's no nastiness but the ratio of performative or inflammatory bullshit to people talking is much lower than the average internet.

I also maintain that an extremely low tolerance for bad faith or cruel behaviour is necessary online. Since the regulatory mechanisms that govern social interaction elsewhere are not available.

Whenever I look at lemmy outside, or worse reddit, it's just performative grandstanding, normalised bigotry, garbled repetition, and in "jokes".